Word: laura
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...selling debut novel, Prep, dropped a Midwestern girl into an East Coast boarding school, where readers watched her struggle toward adulthood. In her third novel, American Wife (Random House, 576 pages), Sittenfeld raises the stakes: this time, the Midwestern girl ends up in the White House. Readers will recognize Laura and George Bush as the inspiration for Sittenfeld's first couple, Alice and Charlie Blackwell, but it's the author's rich imagination that brings the Blackwells to life. TIME's senior arts editor Radhika Jones spoke to Sittenfeld a few days before the book's publication on Sept...
Curtis Sittenfeld: Soon after George W. Bush was elected I read a few articles about Laura Bush that made her seem different from what I would have expected. I learned that she's a big reader, and that she would invite people who had political opinions different from her husband's to events at the governor's mansion and then events at the White House. And then I read a biography of her in 2004 by Ann Gerhart called The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush. That reinforced the sense I had that...
...agree one hundred percent. And if I'd wanted to write a book that was a hatchet job on Laura Bush - if that was my big goal - I could have made it 200 pages. But I wanted to explore the human heart much more than I wanted to explore politics. Some people have said to me, why did you not write more about Charlie Blackwell's political ascension and his becoming governor, and the campaign, and I feel like there are excellent books out there on political campaigns and mine wouldn't add anything to the mix. There...
...book has four sections, and in each section there's a major plot twist that has a strong resemblance to an event in the real life of George and Laura Bush - or Laura Bush, I should say; not all of it is George's. But then everything else is made up. There's a chapter where Charlie Blackwell is drinking heavily, and he buys the baseball team and gives up drinking and finds religion, and obviously those have George Bush parallels. But there's all this other stuff that has to do with a Princeton reunion, and Alice Blackwell...
...Good news! First Lady Laura Bush and McCain's wife Cindy closed the truncated program with an appeal for donations to aid storm victims on the Gulf Coast. "This is a time when we take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats," Cindy McCain said to a burst of applause...