Kerry Kennedy Tells Her Mother Ethel's Story in New Biography
Kerry Kennedy has put her mother's life between hard covers. Her biography, Ethel Kennedy: The Extraordinary Life and Bold Legacy, was published Oct. 13 by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Kennedy wrote it with Maryanne Vollers. The book includes 24 pages of color photographs. Kerry Kennedy is the daughter of Ethel Skakel Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, and a human rights lawyer, activist and New York Times-bestselling author.
The cover photo is a family artifact. It shows her parents at their engagement party in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, dancing and laughing, Town & Country reported in an interview with Kerry Kennedy by Caroline Hallemann published Oct. 17.
That same kind of photo once caught someone else's eye. Taylor Swift saw an old picture of Robert and Ethel Kennedy online and wrote the song "Starlight" about them, learning who they were only later. Kerry Kennedy told Town & Country that her sister Rory Kennedy later introduced Swift to their mother while Rory was making a film about her. Swift then bought a house across the street from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port.
Rory Kennedy knows this ground well. She directed the documentary Ethel, about her mother, which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.
Kerry Kennedy discussed the new book at the New York Public Library with historian Douglas Brinkley, and in an Oct. 16 segment titled "Kerry Kennedy remembers her mother's life and advocacy in new book" on PBS NewsHour. She described an upbringing that moved between a tenement in Chicago and a mansion in Greenwich, Connecticut. In notes about the book, she remembers her mother as a woman who maintained positivity.
The release also lands beside a new screen portrayal. Jessica Harper plays Ethel Kennedy in Love Story. Kerry Kennedy criticized that depiction in an interview with People.
What makes this stand out is the source. This is not an outside look. It is a daughter sorting through home movies, letters and her own memory. The result is intimate by design.
For general readers, no Kennedy expertise is required. The names are famous. The story here is smaller and closer. A marriage, eleven children, widowhood at 40, and decades of advocacy after it.
