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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 Beattie’s Mrs. Nixon is a riveting
exploration of an elusive American icon and of the fiction
writer’s 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 Nixon’s wife: “interchangeable with a Martian,” 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 Nixon’s daughter and his doctor to The Haldeman
Diaries and Jonathan Schell’s The Time of Illusion, Beattie
reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world
from Mrs. Nixon’s point of view. Like Stephen King’s On
Writing, this fascinating and intimate account offers
readers a rare glimpse into the imagination of a writer. Beattie, whose fiction Vanity Fair calls “irony-laced
reports from the front line of the baby boomers’ war with
themselves,” 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.
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