In Reality

A few days ago I felt curious about Marina Oswald so I searched her online, and I through an article I found a link to an interview with her daughter Rachel from 1995. She appears as a baby in Libra, born shortly before the assassination and mostly a minor detail within the novel's many pages. But outside of fiction, she's an adult that appears to have stayed away from the media since the interview in the 90s. Back then she was 29 and working as waitress to pay for college. Rachel recalls her life growing up as the daughter of a presidential assassin; it was pretty normal, aside from her mailbox being shot at and people taunting her about her biological father while she was cheerleading at football games. At one point in the interview, she describes her angry reaction at seeing a fictionalized version of herself in a TV movie set in 1978.
"The writers portray me as this traumatized, victimized kid—there’s a scene of me having a birthday party that no one comes to—just me in my birthday hat all by myself. That never happened. In the final scene they have my sister and me walking hand in hand to the Kennedy Memorial, singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’ That never happened either. I’ve never even been to the Kennedy Memorial. The writers never talked to me or my sister about our lives. I guess they decided we must be a certain way and then wrote it. That kind of stuff makes you feel violated."
While Rachel in the novel doesn't have any kind of characterization (as she is just a baby), reading her statement in this interview made me wonder about how strange it would be to have your life and characterization dictated by someone that doesn't even know you. Especially in such a bizarre manner as the TV movie described above does. Libra is a much better piece of fiction, it has some interesting ways of blending two different plots and showing the thought processes of different characters. But what if other people in Libra were still alive and somehow knew about their presence in the novel? What would their reactions be? As a work of fiction, the depictions in Libra aren't real but include some elements of reality, and the disclaimer at the end iterates that DeLillo isn't intending to pass off his book as "factual." So anyone aware of this stuff should realize that Libra is not trying to be non-fiction and technically isn't "violating" anyone's private lives. Yet I think I can say that it must be really weird to be in a position like Rachel's--it's like she's the daughter of a celebrity but not really. She and her sister have nothing to do with the assassination, yet they are forever linked to it because of who their father was.

Although many conspiracy theorists and historians have put a lot of attention into Lee, Rachel appears to have little interest in her father. This is plausible since he died when she was around a month old and she grew up with a stepfather, but is interesting to note because of the focus on Lee in Libra. Throughout the interview she refers to her biological father as Lee and in a different article dated from 1988 she says "Lee I think of not really as my father. Just, really, this man."

http://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/lee-harveys-legacy/
http://articles.philly.com/1988-11-20/news/26248082_1_lee-harvey-oswald-assassination-marina-and-lee