Mimi Alford in her youth
At dinner last night my wife and I were talking about memoirs and she said the reason they’re popular is we get to judge the people who wrote them.
“I just read that book by JFK’s former mistress, and I thought, what a dope. I found her to be an Episcopalian twit who was completely divorced from all of her feelings.”
My wife reads tons of books but I hadn’t seen Once Upon a Secret lying around the house. It turned out she’d read it on a tablet, weeks before.
“She not only had a creepy affair with JFK who used her and abused her, but her husband turns out to be the same way. And she ultimately gets divorced from him but she never puts it all together. So I realized that’s why we read these memoirs, so we can sit in judgment of these people.”
I asked, “How did JFK come off in the book?”
“A sicko.” My wife reeled off an indictment, right at the dinner table. “The fact that he had her give a blowjob to Dave Powers in front of him. The fact that he wanted her to give a blowjob to his brother Teddy in front of him.
“The fact that he had sex with her umpteen times and she never called him anything other than Mr President and he never kissed her.
“The fact he deflowered her on Jackie’s bed. You just get this picture of a guy who had some really weird sex stuff going on.
“So I think that’s what you do as a reader of memoirs, that’s the pleasure. You sit there and say I wouldn’t have done that, that’s a stupid way to handle that situation. And somehow our own squalid little lives seem a little better…”
“Do you have sympathy for her?”
“In some ways I do. Because I think, you are really an idiot. Because she has a creepy relationship and he does all this weird sexual stuff and after he gets killed, she gets engaged to a young preppie her own age, and she confesses her affair with the President, and he says, I will marry you on one condition, you will never speak of this to anyone.”
“Not even to him?”
“Not him or anyone else. So she’s going from one sexual shrouded relationship with a WASP man to another. Where she’s always kind of kept in the closet, and she accepts it. You’d think she’d have a little bit of self awareness later and not have done the same thing again.”
“Do you ever feel generous to a memoirist?”
“No. That’s not the game. I’m a little embarrassed about it, but I’m a mean reader.”
“How would you have handled the situation?”
“Oh– I would have slept with him too. But I would have gotten a little angry. And I would have started to call him Jack.”
Jack Kennedy was no WASP.He was Irish Catholic.
Sounds fishy to me about all the sexual perversion,as I can’t fathom such behavior by our political leadership(except maybe bent dick),but maybe that power corrupts deal is totally correct.
i love this!
i’m similarly cruel to these kinds of tell all authors tho it’s been awhile since i read one. i think there’s an underlying need for these aged women to communicate how hot they were at one time via the level of person they were screwing. ‘climbing the ladder of success’ but no one knows about them so they have to blather it all over the place to get recognized.
it’s not as if she’s the only one who does this stuff, lots of women have been there who simply have no need to brag about it, and that’s what it is bragging. even if they have to reveal their own gruesome levels of degradation, they don’t care. human sexuality is a strange thing. she could have walked out, she got something out of it. she valued her access or it wouldn’t have been worth it to her and it probably turned her on. her photo looks like a jackie wanna be, down to the dress, hairdo and pearls. how vacuous.
a stronger woman would have taken control, called him jack and had him eating out of her hand, but she was a submissive and now she’s bragging about it. yuk.
“And I would have started to call him Jack.”
Phil, if there were a journo award for Incorporating the Spouse’s Perspective, you (or maybe your wife) would win hands down this year.
Not my cup of tea. But I did fall into watching a bit of the interview. Kept thinking ok what was she 18…19? Could see the first time being thrown off. Especially at that period of time. But over and over again. Something up in her childhood. One thing that stood out for me. She said she wanted her kids to know. So tell them for heavens sake. Her need to tell the world? Weird. Money
“So I realized that’s why we read these memoirs, so we can sit in judgment of these people.” Really “we” How about “I”
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/04/08/2737842/israel-bars-german-author-over.html