Word: laura
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...that the librarian envies and mistrusts. He adores her, without question. She succumbs, with reservations. In Curtis Sittenfeld's brilliant novel American Wife, their names are Alice Lindgren and Charles Blackwell, and they come from Wisconsin. But we also know them, on the evening news, as Laura Welch and George W. Bush from Texas...
...charming but limited man as its President? She is boggled by the simultaneous intimacy and superficiality of public life - that the fact that Charlie likes grabbing dinner at a local hamburger stand might be more important than his views on Islam. One can easily imagine, or perhaps hope, that Laura Bush might worry about that...
...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...
That was my biggest influence, and that's the book I recommend to people. If someone says, Oh, American Wife makes me curious to learn more about Laura Bush, I would definitely urge them to read Ann Gerhart. I read another biography of Laura Bush by Ronald Kessler. I read a book by Frank Bruni called Ambling Into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush about Bush's first presidential campaign. I read Hillary Rodham Clinton's autobiography, which I enjoyed much more than I thought I would. I read a book called For Love of Politics: Inside...
Exactly. And I know the distinction is hard for people to make, but I do not feel like I wrote a novel about Laura and George Bush. I feel like I read things about them that inspired me to create fictional characters, and then these fictional characters lead their own lives and have their own interactions. So this is not a book about Laura Bush's sex life...