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![Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, ride up Broadway in a ticker-tape parade Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, ride up Broadway in a ticker-tape parade](https://cdn.aarp.net/content/dam/aarpe/en/home/entertainment/books/info-2020/james-patterson-interview/_jcr_content/root/container_main/container_body_main/container_body1/container_body_cf/container_image/articlecontentfragment/cfimage.coreimg.50.932.jpeg/content/dam/aarp/entertainment/books/2020/04/1140-jfk-jackie.jpg)
Big topic. Big writer. In his new nonfiction book, The House of Kennedy, James Patterson takes on the saga of America's most famous political family. Written with Cynthia Fagen, this breathless account speeds through tragedies and triumphs, assassinations and overdoses, not to mention an eye-popping array of sex scandals.
It opens with “The Patriarch,” about Joe Kennedy Sr., and ends with “The Prince” — John F. Kennedy Jr., who died, along his wife and her sister, on July 16, 1999, in a plane crash. Says Patterson, 73: “If this was a novel that I was submitting to a publisher, they would say, ‘We really can't do this novel because all this could never happen to one family.’ But it did.”
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Read an excerpt from The House of Kennedy here. Patterson talks about writing it below.
What inspired him to write The House of Kennedy
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The Kennedys are America's royal family. Like The Crown and Queen Elizabeth, the notion of combining these character stories with the events that shaped that period of history from the ‘20s through the ‘90s is pretty stunning. It's a great story. There is greed and wealth. There is incredible historical relevance. There is tragedy after tragedy and there are inspirational triumphs. For a lot of people, they think they know everything about the Kennedys, but with this book, they can see that they didn't.
An adaptation in the works
We're looking at a possible five-season television program. We have a very big show runner who is involved. Her response was the same thing: “I knew pieces, but I didn't really know it all.”
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