Sex, power and Laura Bush

"American Wife" author Curtis Sittenfeld on her first lady obsession, dirty bits with George W., and whether we're responsible for the behavior of our loved ones.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: George W. Bush, Fiction, Books, Interviews, Authors, Novels, Books Interviews, Rebecca Traister

Sept. 8, 2008 | Curtis Sittenfeld's third novel, "American Wife," was published, smartly, smack in the middle of last week's Republican convention.

What this meant, in addition to politically plumped coverage, was that rabid fans of Sittenfeld's first two novels (the debut smash "Prep" and its follow-up, "The Man of My Dreams") who rushed out and bought "American Wife" probably found themselves experiencing an unwelcome familiarity last Tuesday night. That's when George and Barbara Bush (whose unchanging heft and visage make her look like a carved stone monument to imperious matriarchy) took their seats at the Xcel center to watch daughter-in-law Laura introduce the ignominious, boo-proof video feed of her husband slurking through a brief speech from the Oval Office.

The awkward dynastic tableau seemed to spring directly from the pages of Sittenfeld's novel, which makes perfect circular sense, since "American Wife" itself sprang from the Bush dynasty. It is the story of Alice Lindgren, a Wisconsin bookworm who grows up to be an independent-minded librarian before falling in love with the ambling, dopey scion of a powerful political family, eventually finding herself the helpless wife of an unpopular and inept president.

Sittenfeld gave herself the idea for "American Wife" when she wrote a story for Salon in 2004 about her secret, shameful admiration for First Lady Laura Bush. In that story, she wrote that "Laura Bush's own life resembles a great novel." Two and a half years later, Sittenfeld said from her home in St. Louis, where she lives with her new husband, she smacked her head and thought, "Wait, is it the novel I should write? Oh my God!" She realized she had only two years to get it out before the Bush administration came to its long-awaited close, and so she chained herself to her desk, "working feverishly, in a way I've never worked before and never plan to work again."

The result is a big, thick, juicy steak of a book, a page-turner that received early (scandalized!) attention for its sex scenes. Sex with George W. Bush? Ew! But it is a testament to the delicacy with which Sittenfeld treats her characters that the W. stand-in, Charlie Blackwell, is so adoring and puppy-doggish a husband -- even while remaining so detestable a politician -- that the sex actually isn't so hard to stomach. It's also a shame to consider "American Wife" solely on the basis of its dirty bits. In fact, it is a moving and often powerful imaginative experiment, taking as its structure four distinct periods of Alice's life: her teenage years, in which she kills the young man of her dreams in a car accident; her single librarian days, in which she tastes the personal and ideological freedoms she will spend the rest of her life surrendering; her days as a housewife and mother, in which her husband battles the growing realization of his own shortcomings with booze, and then battles booze by buying a baseball team and finding Jesus; and finally, the Blackwells' misbegotten occupation of the White House.

In Sittenfeld's hands, it is a diverting, compulsively readable story, though a reader cannot help wanting to stop the clock on Alice's narrative before she gets to Washington, to change the fictional ending because we can't change the reality. In taking as its topic a relatively unimaginable premise -- being the person who is married to George W. Bush -- "American Wife" pulls us by our bellies through its imaginary peephole, and allows Sittenfeld and her readers to project a thousand pop-psych analyses and hypotheticals: what if she had an abortion, what if her grandmother were a lesbian, what if she always pined for the boy she killed so early in life, what if she really, truly loves her husband. Wiggling her way under Alice's skin affords us a disconcerting view, of what a flawed, and widely hated, man might look like to a smart woman who loves him. As Alice says at the end of the book, just after she reveals that she did not vote for her husband for president, "All I did is marry him. You are the ones who gave him power."

But apart from its invented insights into the lives and loves of the real people on whom it is based, "American Wife" tells a broader and more terrible American story. It's about what it means to be a woman and become a wife, to be present and conscious as the world, or perhaps just your family, moves in sickening directions. It explores what happens when we fill voids in our lives and in our government with booze and power and love and religion. The book wonders what it means to be responsible for, and responsible to, another person. Most searingly, especially after this week of terrifying headlines and the unexpected arrival of Sarah Palin on a presidential ticket, it is a meditation on how accidents -- the kind you have in cars and the kind you have in elections -- happen quickly, sometimes almost noiselessly.

Legally, what can you say about the idea behind this book?

I can say it's loosely inspired by Laura Bush and that Laura Bush's life is a point of departure. This is a thing that is weirdly fascinating to me: If a book is presented as true, there is great public enthusiasm for proving that some or all of it is made up. The inverse is that if I say that this book is fiction, people are obsessed with saying, "No, this is true and this is true." But if I were to say "This is Laura Bush's memoir" people would say, "You're a liar! You made this up from your imagination!"

Well, when I read some of the details of Alice's life, about her car accident, or her librarian days, and recognize them from the little I know about Laura Bush's life, it's hard to resist the impulse to wonder whether you knew things about Laura that I didn't ...

If you don't know if something in the book has some real life parallel to the Bushes, then you should assume it's made up.

Next page: Car crashes! Abortion! Lesbianism! Boyfriend stealing!