“Dazzlingly original, Ann Beattie’s Mrs. Nixon
is a riveting exploration of an elusive American icon and of the fiction
writer’s art. Pat Nixon remains one of our most mysterious and intriguing
public figures, the only modern First Lady who never wrote a memoir. Beattie,
like many of her generation, dismissed Richard Nixon’s wife: “interchangeable
with a Martian,” she said. Decades later, she wonders what it must have been
like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically
self-destructive man. Drawing on a wealth of sources from Life magazine to
accounts by Nixon’s daughter and his doctor to The Haldeman Diaries and
Jonathan Schell’s The Time of Illusion, Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes
in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixon’s point of view. Like Stephen
King’s On Writing, this fascinating and intimate account offers readers a rare
glimpse into the imagination of a writer. Beattie, whose fiction Vanity Fair
calls “irony-laced reports from the front line of the baby boomers’ war with
themselves,” packs insight and humor into her examination of the First Couple
with whom boomers came of age. Mrs. Nixon is a startlingly compelling and
revelatory work.
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