Publishers Weekly - 14.10.2019

22 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ OCTOBER 14, 2019

I

t’s no secret that JFK had lovers,

but Mary Pinchot Meyer stands

apart from the legendary parade of

women. Paul Wolfe became

intrigued with her after reading a

small article, and then the intrigue became

an obsession, which in turn became a

novel: The Lost Diary of M, publishing

February 2020 from Harper. In it, Wolfe

imagines Meyer’s diary, a document

rumored to have been destroyed after her

murder in 1964.

“She’s mysterious,” Wolfe says. “She

hung out with famous people, but she

wasn’t famous. There’s very little infor-

mation about her, very few pictures; she

was never interviewed. And her life

anticipated everything that was to come:

women’s liberation, feminism, the drug

culture [she sampled LSD and, according

to her biographer, Nina Burleigh, was

involved with Timothy Leary during his

tenure at Harvard].”

Meyer was well born and educated, a

She Was JFK’s Lover

Paul Wolfe’s novel imagines the “lost” diary of Mary Pinchot Meyer,

JFK’s murdered paramour

Column|OPEN BOOK

Louisa Ermelino

Paul Wolfe

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