O, Jackie!
Andrew Brewster Crawford, A.K.A: “A.B.C.”, a playwright obsessed with the glamour, glory, and gloom of the Kennedy era, has written a play about the last day of J.F.K.’s life in order to cast himself as the martyred president, win the love of a beautiful “Jackie Kennedy type” and live happily ever after in a Camelot of his own creation.
He’s got the great man down. The wind-swept haircut. The sailing-ready nautical digs. The Boston-by-way-of-Harvard accent. The easy witticisms to defuse tension. But in A.B.C.’s quest to fashion himself after his hero, J.F.K., and mount his magnum opus, he conducts himself more like L.B.J., a man who believed that the quickest route from point A to point B ran underground.
O Jackie! is a story about the internal and external chaos created when an artist with both a superman and an inferiority complex chooses to be the self he wishes he was, instead of the self he truly is.
"A wonderfully stylish and funny portrait of a man gifted with such ambition, talent and self-destruction, I dare you to put the book down. As the quote, 'There is no substitute for the real thing' came frequently to the mind of the book’s Andrew Brewster Crawford, it also came to my mind as I read this dazzling debut novel by Alexander Carver -- he is the real thing." -Kevin Hageman ,co-writer and creator of the Lego Movies
"O Jackie is much more than a novel about an alluring First Lady who captured the nation's imagination. It is a compelling drama about Andrew Brewster Crawford, a struggling playwright, who attempts to define himself (and his relationships) through a personal obsession with JFK and his stunning wife. Unlike the Kennedy's, who perfected the art of image-making, Crawford learns the painful life-lesson that deception is self-destructive. Alexander Carver's tour de force is sentimentally nostalgic as well as hauntingly instructive." - William C. Kashatus, author, Before Chappaquiddick: Mary Jo Kopechne and the Kennedy Brothers
“Alex Carver has written a funny, fast paced and very entertaining novel. His occasionally unhinged protagonist, ABC, is relatable because he's a heightened version of the imposter in all of us." -Gary Murphy, producer of Night Court and Malcolm in the Middle