American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
“American Wife” is the bold third fictional novel by Curtis Sittenfeld, author of the best-selling “Prep” (2005), which portrays a thinly veiled First Lady Laura Bush. Sittenfeld is sure to come under fire for blurring the lines between fiction and reality but the book is as winning as it is confident. She manages to craft out of the first-person narration a compelling, human voice that is full of kindness and decency.
It’s all fiction, but major events mirror Mrs. Bush’s life, including a car accident that kills a friend was the inspiration for the fictional life of Sittenfeld’s heroine, Alice Blackwell. In the fictional novel, the accident haunts Alice for most of her adult life and became the subject of questions and speculation when it was revealed during her husband’s presidential re-election.
In a memoir told entirely in the first person, Alice Blackwell relays her unlikely ascent to the White House from her humble Wisconsin beginnings. She conveys in convincing, thoroughly riveting detail a life far more complicated than it appears on the surface—the moment she discovered that her beloved grandmother was a lesbian; a tragic, life-changing car accident she had as a teenager; the friendship she willingly sacrificed with her best friend when she started dating the good-humored, athletic Charlie Blackwell; and her uncomfortable initiation into the tight-knit, immensely wealthy Blackwell family, run with unflappable authority by its formidable matriarch. No one is more surprised than Alice when her hard-drinking, sports-team-owning husband morphs into a born-again Christian with political ambitions. Suddenly, Alice’s life is no longer her own as her every move is parsed for its political implications.
Laura Bush has finally opened up publicly about the mysterious car accident she had when she was 17 in her new book, “Spoken From the Heart”, that will be released on May 4, 2010. In it, Mrs. Bush describes in vivid detail the circumstances surrounding the crash that claimed the life of a high school friend on a dark country road in Midland, Tex.
To read more about “Spoken From The Heart” by Laura Bush, visit NYTimes.com.
For more information about “American Wife” by Curtis Sittenfeld, visit CurtisSittenfeld.com.
Possibly Related Posts:
At its heart, Shanghai Girls is a story of sisters: Pearl and May are inseparable best friends, who share hopes, dreams, and a deep connection. But like sisters everywhere, they also harbor petty jealousies and rivalries. They love each other but they also know exactly where to drive the knife to hurt the other sister the most. Along the way there are terrible sacrifices, impossible choices and one devastating, life-changing secret, but through it all the two heroines of this astounding new novel by Lisa See hold fast to who they are – Shanghai girls.
