The Lost Diary of M

Summary (from the publisher): Who was Mary Pinchot Meyer?

She was a longtime lover of JFK. 

She was the ex-wife of a CIA chief. 

She was the sister-in-law of the Washington Post's Ben Bradlee. 

She believed in mind expansion and took LSD with Timothy Leary. 

She was a painter, a socialite, and a bohemian in Georgetown during the Cold War. 

And she ended up dead in an unsolved murder a year after JFK's assassination. 

The diary she kept was never found. Until now...

An engrossing debut novel that cannily reimagines the extraordianry life and mysterious death of the bohemian Georgetown socialite whose life and death shocked Washington society but are little known outside of it. This fictional diary introduces a woman ahead of her time, a feminist who lived by her own rules and paid the ultimate price for her independence. 

Review: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this novel from HarperCollins. 

Written as a fictional diary, this novel explores the secret life of Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was a longtime lover of President John F. Kennedy and who was mysteriously murdered a year after his death. This novel depicts Mary as unrestricted by society's typical rules surrounding women. She is divorced, sleeps with the married president, strips down to her skin and dives in pools at parties, and is an ardent advocate of the mind opening abilities of taking LSD. 

Mary Pinchot Meyer is an interesting historical figure and an intriguing subject matter for a novel yet I was disappointed in the execution of her story. There's very little real insight into her death, only shadowy figures and conspiracy theory type allusions. Wolfe has chosen to portray JFK as the great love of Mary's life, and someone to whom JFK turned for solace and guidance, which seems like a stretch. For that matter, the fact that Wolfe chose to write a first person narrative from a woman's perspective was not a true success. There was no true sense of her emotional or internal life that could have breathed life into her character. 

I appreciated this novel's illumination of a figure generally lost to history and thought the choice to write the book as an imagined diary was a good one. However, I did not particularly enjoy the story or the imagined inner life of Mary Pinchot Meyer. 

Stars: 3