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A Novelist Imagines a Life
Scribner
November 2011
On Sale: November 15, 2011
304 pages
ISBN: 1439168717
EAN: 9781439168714
Kindle: B004T4KRMY
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Dazzlingly original, Ann Beattieβs Mrs. Nixon is a riveting exploration of an elusive American icon and of the fiction writerβs art. 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 Nixonβs wife: βinterchangeable with a Martian,β she said. Decades later, she wonders what it must have been like to be married to such a spectacularly ambitious and catastrophically self-destructive man. Drawing on a wealth of sources from Life magazine to accounts by Nixonβs daughter and his doctor to The Haldeman Diaries and Jonathan Schellβs The Time of Illusion, Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixonβs point of view. Like Stephen Kingβs On Writing, this fascinating and intimate account offers readers a rare glimpse into the imagination of a writer. Beattie, whose fiction Vanity Fair calls βirony-laced reports from the front line of the baby boomersβ war with themselves,β packs insight and humor into her examination of the First Couple with whom boomers came of age. Mrs. Nixon is a startlingly compelling and revelatory work.
 Media BuzzWeekend Edition Saturday - November 12, 2011
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