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Scribner
304 pages
Product Description
<em>The New York Times Book Review</em> recently hailed Ann Beattie as “a national treasure,” and selected <em>The New Yorker Stories </em> as one of the top 10 books of 2010. Here, Beattie delivers a wholly original work about Pat Nixon—a riveting exploration of an elusive and modern icon and of the fiction writer’s art. <P>Mrs. Nixon, once a community theatre actress, understood the world, in part, from some of the roles she played. Ann Beattie puts her on stage again, to try to understand what her thoughts may have been—from the perspective of a fiction writer. <P> 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 as “interchangeable with a Martian.” But decades later, she wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically self-destructive man. <P> Drawing on a wealth of sources from <em>Life</em> magazine to accounts by Nixon’s daughter, and his doctor, to <em>The Haldeman Diaries </em> and Jonathan Schell’s <em>The Time of Illusion</em>, Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixon’s point of view. Like Stephen King’s <em>On Writing</em>, this fascinating and intimate account offers readers an unprecedented glimpse into the imagination of a writer. <P> Beattie, whose fiction <em>Vanity Fair</em> calls “irony-laced reports from the front line of baby-boomers’ war with themselves,” packs insight and humor into her examination of the First Couple with whom boomers came of age. <em>Mrs. Nixon</em> is a startlingly compelling and revelatory work.