Jackie Collins’ first novel, The World is Full of Married Men (published in 1968) was famously deemed ‘nasty, filthy and disgusting’ by her contemporary Barbara Cartland, which undoubtedly helped propel it to the bestseller list.
She was not only the queen of the bonkbuster, glamour and pretty much everything else, but Jackie Collins’ passing last week revealed her bravery and selflessness. Only a few days before her death, she told People that she was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer six-and-a-half years ago. She had kept it private and didn’t tell her sister Joan until a few weeks before her death because she didn’t want to ‘burden’ her with it.
In the past, Jackie got through the passing of two consecutive husbands by ‘celebrating their lives, as opposed to dwelling on their deaths.’ And while the rest of the world self-obsessively blogs about how we feel, Jackie wrote five bestsellers and travelled the world on book tours following her diagnosis. Her actions up to the last moment revealed a sense of stoicism in the truest sense of the word.
Indeed, scientist and philosopher, Massimo Pigliucci, whose blog on stoicism in the New York Times went viral earlier this year, paraphrases a stoic principle: ‘We are social beings; we are supposed to be concerned about people.’ (You can have a go at adapting stoic ideas for modern living during Stoic Week 2015.)
Of course, Jackie didn’t take herself seriously either. Asked in 2011 whether she was dating, she replied, ‘I have a man for every occasion,’ adding, ‘When I was a kid growing up, I used to read my father’s Playboy and I’d see these guys and they had fantastic apartments and cars. I have all of that now. Why would I want to hook myself up with one man when I’ve had two fantastic men in my life? One was my husband for over 20 years and one was my fiancé for six years.’
‘I did it my way, as Frank Sinatra would say,’ she told People during her final interview. And what an inspirational way for the rest of us.
