Come to the Edge: A Love Story

After reading this book, I wished it was a different ending... J. F. Kennedy Jr, needed her in his life. Miss Haag, was his rock! Reading the out side sports she did, I love adventure but I think J.F. Kennedy Jr, pushed it so far. Miss haag did more then most girl friends would have ever done with him. I also, after reading many books now with the take of J.F. Kennedy Jr. Wife. They looked good in books and reading material but they not matched in anyway. John needed, Miss Haag to ground him. He knew this... He also knew, he was lost and could not offer her a life down the road. He did not know what road to take. John, wanted and loved to act, I feel, this was a big part of why he kept close to Miss Haag and he really did love her. She gets him... but his family and the people demanded something great out of him. I would have loved to have seen him marry the one that could have helped him the most, Miss Haag. I also thing, she was a beautiful women and smart enough to know John was lost and was always grabing for something. The fact that Jackie mentions she may not have stayed with his father if he was to come back. This book, also makes me glad I am a normal person and can walk down the street and eat with others with out being on a book, mag, or any other money making item. Will say, the book is hard to follow for me. I had to keep reading and going back to realize, this is how she wrote the book... I did, have a hard time. Miss Haag, I would love to see a movie come out of this...

Forget that this book is about a member of America's so-called Royal Family. Although the glamour and privilege of being a Kennedy are woven through many pages of this luminous memoir, it's a testament to Christina Haag's loving, scrupulous memory; her understanding of the universals of love among childhood-friends-turning-pals-turning-soulmates; and her romantic's limning of the piercing Aha! moments of coming or age in a very precise time and place (it doesn't hurt that it's a glamorous one), that all cliched associations with The Kennedys fade as you read. You are reading a story of self-discovery, and mutual self-discovery, and rapture, in a finely described, very particular milieu. The story opens with Christina and John circling each other as uniformed private school peers in the elite but constricted world of MAD MEN Era uber-Upper East Side. You feel the world changing as Vatican II and The Sixties opens her eyes, as she wanders two blocks, six blocks, then thrillingly subways down to the once-verboten Village to realize her love and her destiny: Acting. Like the best of Manhattan-based coming of age memoirs, the exotic rituals of one tiny class of people are painstakingly but never judgmentally rendered, and the city's uniquely tight geography - a mile is like an ocean! -- makes the change of world on that life-stuffed little island amusingly and plausibly epic. The young John -- open, eager, but a bit hapless among his savvier young peers -- turns out to be Christina's housemate at Brown (Christiane Amanpour is a third; what a house!) - and they Roommate Cute, including a fight over the night's menu. But something is inevitably pulling these two together -- and we know enough about them and LIKE them enough to greet their eventual full-blown committed love affair (launched when they play opposite one another in an Irish play) with forward-leaning sympathy, respect -- and fascination. They travel - man, do they travel! -- far and wide, with innkeepers and hoteliers always opening the doors with a young-royals-greeting smile..but their blithe, adventurous privilege (and bravery in roiling nature) never makes you jealous; they are, thanks to Christina's trustworthy emphasis, too fully realized as characters, too likeable and decent, and, each in their own way, too vulnerable, for jealousy to cloud your enjoyment of their love affair. Not an easy feat. Haag weaves in the "Kennedy" parts with such bone-deep comfort and naturalness, they have a striking intimacy but never seem preening at all. Her scenes at Jackie's Martha's Vineyard house are so personal and revealing they're gasp-worthy,but there's no sense of trespass, of exploitation. And here, as everywhere, what counts is the character development. That the once-too-rambunctious John is still smarting from earlier unwelcome incursions on her mother's private time (so much so that he uncharacteristically lashes out at Christina) is what we see. That Jackie let John have his girflriend spend the night in his room because she wanted to raise a very different (and better) young man than his womanizing-in-a-sex-negative-world father is an observation as natural and sensible as it is understated. Inevitably, the burdens of being too venerated for his lineage while trying to make his own way, as his own man (and the temptations of a too-handsome, too-famous young man in a Page Six world) start cropping up, and hindering the impressively nurtured relationship of a couple who, in different circumstances, would keep growing together. (You WILL set down the book at some point, sigh, and say: Damn! He SHOULD have married her!) Inevitably, they break up. But no one is the bad guy here because Haag has portrayed John with such plausible humanity and aching specificity (and herself with wise measure -- again, no Hey-I-got-THIS-guy braggadacio). That we know what is to come (and, wisely, Haag places her response to his death earlier in the book; she doesn't risk melodrama OR anticlimax by keeping it in strict sequence) is made all the more poignant by our understanding that this charming but pretty minimally spoiled young man could not beat the misinformation, stuffed in his face from childhood, that he could take risks others could NOT take and walk away unscathed. Like many Americans, I cried when I turned on the TV that summer morning in the '90s and heard the astonishing news of his death. He had always seemed so damn sweet! Guileless, almost -- well, guileless AND foxy, if one can be both. That hunch I had about him was justified -- vivified -- by a scene in the book: John, then in high school, has excitedly spent his allowance money buying his mother not one dress but two (!) for her birthday. Of course, he -- a klutzy young male, despite it all; endearingly not knowing much about fashion, every privilege in his life notwithstanding -- he bought them at a downscale chain dress store, the kind in which receptionists from Queens might shop. "Mommy loved them!" he reports to Christina. (I'm doing this scene from memory; forgive.) "She loved them!" Did she wear them, this perennial # 1 on the Best Dressed List? "Oh, yes!" he says. "All the time. But only inside the apartment." If there is a better description of a very good mother and dear dear teenage son, I challenge you to bring them to me. Thank you -- and Brava, Christina.-- Sheila Weller

Every once in a while you come across a book that ignites a sense of emotional hunger inside of you, a hunger that gets you hooked and compels you to read on, even when you should be doing other things like getting the groceries or doing that load of washing that's been sitting there all week! A book that compels you to not make any plans so that you can sit down, uninterrupted, to be taken on a journey and let into the private world of a complete stranger who has an exceptional story to tell. This is one of those books.Christina Haag is a theatre actress who grew up in New York City during the 1970s and 80s - a time when America had begun to outgrow it's conservative roots, shifting into a mecca of multiculturalism and undergoing great social and economic changes. Christina recalls this as an exciting time to be a young college student and aspiring actress and she portrays this time in her life with great fondness and nostalgia.What makes Christina's story 'exceptional'? What is it about her journey that drew me in like a magnet? Why did I love this book so much? Christina Haag grew up as a close friend of John F. Kennedy Jnr (aka as John John) - the charismatic, handsome son of JFK.It is through this friendship that Christina begins this literary journey, revealing the first time she laid eyes on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis when she was a young girl attending the same school as John's sister Caroline, and the slow growing friendship that she formed with this lady of history, at first from a distance as John John's school friend and then later as a confidante when Christina and John fell in love in their early 20s.This book offers a rare insight into the Kennedy family - holidays that Christina attended, the wedding of John's sister Caroline, the experience of getting to know one of the most famous First Lady's in American history, and most importantly, the personal experience of new love and the trials and tribulations that inevitably entered the turbulent and passionate relationship that Christina and John shared. To Christina's credit, she never crosses a line into exposing anything too private or outlandish about what she saw and experienced within the Kennedy family and you get a sense that there was a mutually shared love and respect between them.Christina describes her grief when she first heard the news that John had died tragically with his wife Caroline and her sister in a plane crash in 1999. She delves deeply into the reasons why she feels they did not end up marrying and you can't help but wonder if she would have been on that plane if they had.The book is beautifully written, as though Christina were writing a poetic love letter to John himself, the words flowing eloquently and with ease. At times Christina's chapters jump from various time frames - one minute you're reading about a date she was having with John, the next you're reading about an experience she had as a child. This may bother some people, but I found that it didn't really affect the flow of the story given that it is written so well.I recommend this book to all those who enjoy a good love story and anyone who has a fascination with the Kennedy family.

Christina Haag describes love so deeply and so simply as she intimately writes about her friendship and then romantic relationship with John F.Kennedy Jr. Her memoir has a haunting quality to it, not only because we know the last tragic chapter but because she is able to transport the reader into a New York that is naive, glamorous, dangerous, rarified and now gone. COME TO THE EDGE is a memoir/history novel that one tries to slow down one’s reading while nearing the end so as not to get to that last page. A brave and beautifully written memoir.“Come to the edge," he said."We can't, we're afraid!" they responded."Come to the edge," he said."We can't, We will fall!" they responded."Come to the edge," he said.And so they came.And he pushed them.And they flew”Guillaume ApollinaireI wept and was engaged from beginning to end. The book has so much grace and sensitivity- it is a timeless love letter. Christina Haag reveals her deep sensitivity and discretion and never slips into sensationalism- she is all restraint and simple honesty and she is a beautifully gifted writer. This is a moving personal and delicate memoir about love, loss and what might have been.

Christina Haag’s memoir is full of heart and soul. It has just the right amount of sentimentality and nostalgia, joy and sadness, life’s full spectrum of emotions, written in a deeply sensitive and elegant manner. It is not only about young love and childhood friendships, it is a love letter to her city, her youth and life in general. There is a touch of magic there and by the time you finish you will want to give her a hug and be her friend. I wish her all things magical.Regina Ryan

This was an eloquent, moving account of Haag's relationship with JFK, Jr. Honest and beautifully written, unlike the typical sensationalist celebrity biographies.

This book was well-written and I found it mesmerizing, giving new insights into JFK Jr. I highly recommend it.

An interesting read and was donated to a book sale.Anne