It’s easy for New York Times bestselling author Emily Giffin to remember how long she’s been a published author. She was on tour with her literary debut, “Something Borrowed,” when her identical twin sons were just a few months old. They’re 18 now and headed to Columbia University in the fall on cross country and track scholarships.
In that time, the Atlanta author has published 11 romance novels, the latest of which, “Meant to Be” (Penguin Random House, $28), came out on May 31.
It’s about Joseph S. Kingsley III, the dashing, free-spirited son of an illustrious and high-profile American family plagued by tragedies who falls in love with Cate Cooper, a former model who loathes the limelight. If that sounds vaguely familiar, there’s good reason. Giffin’s inspiration for “Meant to Be” was John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn Bessette.
“Ever since I was a little girl I’ve been fascinated by the Kennedy family,” said Giffin, speaking from Rosemary Beach, Florida, where she was vacationing with her 15-year-old daughter. “It’s something I inherited from my mother who told me all the stories about Camelot and, of course, the tragic ones, too, about where she was when she found out that Kennedy was assassinated.”
Giffin became even more enchanted with the Kennedys after she graduated from the University of Virginia law school in 1997 and moved to New York City to practice law. This was during the height of the media frenzy that surrounded JFK Jr. and Bessette, who were newly married.
“I think a lot of people, myself definitely included, pinned a lot of hopes on the two of them,” said Giffin. “We wished for them to have their happily ever after that eluded his father and Jackie. But of course, as we all know, his story ended just as tragically as his father’s. It was that unfulfilled promised and those questions of ‘what if?’ that really inspired this story.”
Nevertheless, Giffin asserts that “Meant to Be” is not based on the Kennedys, just inspired by them.
“At its heart, ‘Meant to Be’ is a love story,” she said. “It’s set in New York City and the Hamptons in the ‘90s. And it follows the unlikely romance between the most eligible bachelor in the country who comes from a very glamorous family and a young woman with a troubled past. The book explores the question of whether love can conquer all and whether some relationships are meant to be.”
Despite the premise, the characters of Joe and Cate are entirely fictional.
“Cate especially is nothing like Carolyn Bessette,” said Giffin. “They have very different backgrounds. But that’s one of the really fun parts of writing fiction is that you can take an inspiration and turn it into something completely different.”
Instead of a president who’s been assassinated, Joe’s father is a famous astronaut who dies on a mission. And instead of coming from an upper middle-class family, Cate has only faint memories of her father and grows up in chaos with a mother who uses men for financial gain. When a dark secret from her family’s past surfaces, she begins to doubt whether she and Joe have a future together.
When it came to creating Cate’s character, Giffin was working with a pretty blank slate because so little was really known about Bessette.
“One of the things that’s so tragic and also so alluring about Carolyn to us is we felt like we knew JFK Jr. … but Carolyn was a mystery in a lot of ways. You could sense her resistance to the limelight, and you could sense that she wanted her privacy, and that was a challenge to her,” said Giffin.
“My sense was that’s what John found to be so appealing about her … that she wasn’t marrying into the family because she wanted that fame, or she wanted to be in the limelight. It was a drawback to her, but she loved him quite a bit. So that sort of essence I really tapped into, what that would feel like — to love someone in spite of their fame and fortune and not because of. That’s definitely the tension in the story. Can they overcome these differences? Can they overcome these challenges?
In the end, that’s what we wonder about John and Carolyn, too, she said.
“I’d like to think that had they lived they’d be living happily ever after with children and careers that they found to be rewarding. But we just don’t know, and I think that mystery also fuels the intrigue that has remained for all these years.”
Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Contact her at svanatten@ajc.com, and follow her on Twitter at @svanatten.
