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The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, And Fate
Marjorie Williams
One of Washington's finest writers on people, politics, and life-collected for the first time
PublicAffairs
November 2005
384 pages
ISBN: 1586483633
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Marjorie Williams knew Washington from top to bottom.
Beloved for her sharp analysis, elegant prose and
exceptional ability to intuit character, Williams wrote
political profiles for the Washington Post and Vanity Fair
that came to be considered the final word on the capital's
most powerful figures. Her accounts of playing ping-pong
with Richard Darman, of Barbara Bush's stepmother quaking
with fear at the mere thought of angering the First Lady,
and of Bill Clinton angrily telling Al Gore why he failed
to win the presidency-to name just three treasures
collected here-open a window on a seldom-glimpsed human
reality behind Washington's determinedly blank faade. Williams also penned a weekly column for the Post's op-ed
page and epistolary book reviews for the online magazine
Slate. Her essays for these and other publications tackled
subjects ranging from politics to parenthood. During the
last years of her life, she wrote about her own mortality
as she battled liver cancer, using this harrowing
experience to illuminate larger points about the nature of
power and the randomness of life. Marjorie Williams was a woman in a man's town, an outsider
reporting on the political elite. She was, like the
narrator in Randall Jarrell's classic poem, "The Woman at
the Washington Zoo," an observer of a strange and exotic
culture. This splendid collection-at once insightful, funny
and sad-digs into the psyche of the nation's capital,
revealing not only the hidden selves of the people that run
it, but the messy lives that the rest of us lead.
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