Joan's picks: The God of the Woods and Ask Not : The Kennedys and the Women they Destroyed

The God of the Woods by Liz Moore. I loved her previous novel Long Bright River which came out a few years ago, and now she’s done it again. The wealthy Van Laar family own a summer camp on their property, from which their teenage daughter Barbara disappears - sixteen years after her eight year old brother also went missing. How could one family lose two children in such a way? There are a lot of questions, as years of grief and mystery culminate in the search for her, which also brings them answers from the past. This is a story which gently unfolds and is quietly compelling.

Ask Not : The Kennedys and the Women they Destroyed by Maureen Callaghan. The Kennedy men have an aura which has passed down through generations. They’re seen as all American good guys but in their wake they’ve left a litany of misery for the women unfortunate enough to have come into their orbit - and there’s a lot of them. This is a true story about how a veneer of respectability has enabled Kennedy men to behave unbelievably badly; and how their wealth, power, connections and sheer ability to lie has seen them protected and absolved time and time again.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News TALKSEDB.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Joan mackenzie joins me now to talk books. Good morning, Hello,
So what have you got for us today? First book
is a novel. It's a bit of a mystery called
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore. Now, a
few years ago I read a book she wrote called
Long Bright River, which I was immediately struck by. She
is a terrific writer and this is a completely different

(00:34):
kind of theme and environment, but g it's good. She's
just a great writer. So it's the story of a
wealthy family called the Van Lars and in the Adirondacks
in America. They have not only a large wealthy estate
on which they live, but the section of it is
a summer camp where kids come to stay over the
summer and they have camp leaders and they do things,

(00:56):
and you know, it's where kids often go, as I
understand it, in American summertime. And the daughter of the estate,
Barbara Van Lah, is a young teenager and she's very
excited because she's going to go and move into the
summer camp and spend her summer there away from her
mother who really doesn't take that much interest in her
because some years ago, her brother, who was I think

(01:21):
he was eighty years old at the time, disappeared and
was never seen again. Now she was born after that disappearance,
but off she goes to the summer camp as a
teenager and lo and behold, she also goes missing. So
the question is how on earth can one family lose
two children, And there's a concerted effort to try and
find her. There's a guy who's wandering around in the

(01:43):
vicinity who is known as a convicted serial killer, and
he was present at both the time her brother went
missing and she goes missing, and a lot of people
think that because he's in the area, it must be him.
But it slowly unwinds itself and tells this story about
a family in crisis. Ever since the boy went missing,

(02:05):
the dad's become workaholic, he's hardly of a home. The
mother's become an alcoholic. She takes very little interest in
this daughter, Barbara, who then goes missing. And as all
the authorities come and work with them to try and
uncover exactly what's happened, they get the answers to the
question they've been waiting for for so long. Oh gosh,
it sounds good. Okay, ask Not the Kennedys and the

(02:26):
women they destroy. A lot has been written about the Kennedys,
but I'm not sure has anybody ever taken this angle.

Speaker 3 (02:31):
No, not that I'm aware of. It's by Maureen Callahan,
who's a respected journalist in the States, and ask Not,
of course, comes from the ask not what you can
do for your country line that JFK became famous for.
So the premise of this book is that right from
the time of Joseph Kennedy, who was the patriarch from
whom the future generations have flowed, their treatment of women

(02:55):
has been simply appalling. And there's been this myth of
the Golden Age of Camelot and the Kennedy men have
all been seen as great American people. But actually you
read this book and you just despair Joseph Kennedy. For starters,
his daughter Rosemary became something of a troubled teenager, so
he sent her off to a mental institution where he

(03:16):
organized a lobotomy for her. Then, of course he had JFK.
Well reading this book, I don't know how JFK ever
had time to govern because there was so much stuff
going on with the interns and with his staff that
reading it honestly, I know that he was considered to
be an amazing president for America, but or there was

(03:38):
a lot of other stuff that was happening. Then there's
people like Ted Kennedy who married Joan, who was an alcoholic.
Tried to get off the drink. They just kept giving
her booze so that she couldn't get off the wagon.
He drove Mary Joe Kopeckney into the river at Chapits
Roy which, if you recall, he got out of the car.
They say that she would have lived for at least

(03:59):
an hour after he disappeared. He didn't alert the police
for ten years. But it all became about poor Ted
and the difficult situation in which he found himself while
her family got no airtime at all. There was Robert
who's now running for president. He married Mary, He gas
lit her, He did dreadful things. She got to the
point where she had to go to other mothers on

(04:20):
the school run and say, please, can you give me
ten or twenty dollars because I've got nothing. She eventually
hanged herself. He tried to get her therapist to say
that she was mentally unwell. The therapist said, no, no, no,
she's just unhappy. John Junia goes on and on John Junior,
Carolyn Bissett, the Plan Crash, for which he was entirely responsible.
Just extraordinary stuff. It is salacious, it is gossipy. It

(04:43):
has evidential information that makes you know and believe that
this stuff is true. And I loved it.

Speaker 2 (04:49):
Thank you so much. Joan the God of the Woods
by Liz Moore was the first book, and Ask Not
The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan
was a second book.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
Tooknic's Weight To See You Then.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks It'd be from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.