Skip to Main Content (Press Enter)
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Add American Wife to bookshelf
Add to Bookshelf

American Wife

Best Seller
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Paperback $18.00
Feb 10, 2009 | ISBN 9780812975406

Buy from Other Retailers:

See All Formats (3) +
  • $18.00

    Feb 10, 2009 | ISBN 9780812975406

    Buy from Other Retailers:

  • Sep 02, 2008 | ISBN 9781588367532

    Buy from Other Retailers:

  • Sep 02, 2008 | ISBN 9781415956984

    1404 Minutes

    Buy from Other Retailers:

  • Sep 02, 2008 | ISBN 9780739323878

    555 Minutes

    Buy from Other Retailers:

Buy the Audiobook Download:

Listen to a sample from American Wife

Product Details

Praise

“A brilliant novel . . . and a grand entertainment.”—Joe Klein, Time

“An intimate and daring story . . . Alice is a woman of considerable intellect, compassion and character.”USA Today

“Curtis Sittenfeld is an amazing writer, and American Wife is a brave and moving novel about the intersection of private and public life in America. Ambitious and humble at the same time, Sittenfeld refuses to trivialize or simplify people, whether real or imagined.”—Richard Russo

“Sittenfeld installs herself deep within the psyche of the tight-lipped wife of the president and emerges with an evenhanded, compassionate look at her mind and heart. . . . Powerfully intimate. Grade: A.”The Washington Post Book World

“A sparkling, sprawling novel . . . a ridiculously gifted writer . . . Sittenfeld has harnessed her talents perfectly in American Wife, producing an exhilarating epic infused with humor, pain and hope.”BookPage

“A well-researched book that imagines what lies behind that placid facade of the first lady . . . Ms. Sittenfeld was not out to sensationalize but sympathize. The portraits of Laura and W.—known as Alice and Charlie Blackwell here—are trenchant and make you like them more.”—Maureen Dowd, The New York Times

“A gripping epic of public and private lives. A gem.”Good Housekeeping

American Wife reveals how difficult it can be, living this American life with its dreams of power and prosperity, to be true to yourself. . . . Sittenfeld hits all the hot spots: daughterhood, sex, money, career, marriage, motherhood. . . . Alice’s life has something in it for every American female.”Los Angeles Times

“Audacious . . . Sittenfeld’s imagination knows no bounds.”People

“Showing that she’s grown immensely even since her bestselling debut, Sittenfeld now claims her spot as one of a new generation’s greatest novelists.”BUST

“[Sittenfeld] writes in the sharp, realistic tradition of Philip Roth and Richard Ford—clear, unpretentious prose; metaphors so spot-on you barely notice them. Sittenfeld may have lifted the set pieces from a real woman’s life, but in the process she has created a wise and insightful character who is entirely her own.”Time Out New York

“The novel is a gift, a sweeping exploration of a woman’s odyssey from obscurity to fame and the painful decisions she must make along the way.”The Miami Herald

“We love Sittenfeld. We love her wry, razor-sharp observations. We love her funny, straightforward honesty. . . . An empathetic, fascinating, and gorgeously written story about a thirty-year marriage. We devoured it in one night.”Boston magazine

“If you’ve ever wondered, while watching President Bush cavorting through the minefields of foreign policy and public opinion, ‘What must Laura be thinking?’ novelist Curtis Sittenfeld has written the book for you.”The Dallas Morning News

Author Q&A

A Conversation with the Author

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Time for permission to reprint an interview with Curtis Sittenfeld by Radhika Jones, senior arts editor, Time, copyright © 2008 by Time. Reprinted by permission of Time Inc.

Time: How did this idea come to you?

Curtis Sittenfeld:
Soon after George W. Bush was elected I read a few articles about Laura Bush that made her seem different from what I would have expected. I learned that she’s a big reader, and that she would invite people who had political opinions different from her husband’s to events at the governor’s mansion and then events at the White House. And then I read a biography of her in 2004 by Ann Gerhart called The Perfect Wife: The Life and Choices of Laura Bush. That reinforced the sense I had that she had led a really complex and interesting life. So I wrote this article for Salon—which I would not have written if I’d known that I would end up writing this book—that was basically about being a liberal who has this weird admiration for Laura Bush. In that article I said that her life resembled a novel. And then two years later it occurred to me, I should write that novel.

It’s clear when you read the book that it’s about the first couple, but it feels equally like a book about relationships and how you fall in love and how your character forms.

I agree one hundred percent. And if I’d wanted to write a book that was a hatchet job on Laura Bush—if that was my big goal—I could have made it two hundred pages. But I wanted to explore the human heart much more than I wanted to explore politics. Some people have said to me, Why did you not write more about Charlie Blackwell’s political ascension and his becoming governor, and the campaign, and I feel like there are excellent books out there on political campaigns and mine wouldn’t add anything to the mix. There are so many people who are so much better qualified to write about politics than I am.

I understand that plot is very important to you; you have literary concerns but you also want to keep people turning the pages. And that happens in American Wife. But in this case, unlike your earlier novels, many of the elements of the plot came to you ready-made. Did that affect the way you worked?

The book has four sections, and in each section there’s a major plot twist that has a strong resemblance to an event in the real life of Laura Bush. But then everything else is made up. There’s a chapter where
Charlie Blackwell is drinking heavily, and he buys the baseball team and gives up drinking and finds religion, and obviously those have George Bush parallels. But there’s all this other stuff that has to do with a Princeton reunion, and Alice Blackwell’s sister-in-law having doubts about her own marriage. So even in the sections that borrow most heavily from real life, almost everything is made up. And of course, literally, every scene is made up—because even if we all know that there’s a point when George Bush became religious, I sure wasn’t there!

How long ago did you start working on it?

It’s been two years in the making. When I was writing my first two books I was also freelancing and teaching and doing other odd jobs. For this one I pretty much just wrote. And I wrote much longer hours
than I had in the past. I worked more intensively on this book than I plan to for any future book. I don’t think I’ll have another book for four or five years, and that’s fine with me. In some ways I think it would be very dignified if I went away for twenty years and then wrote my fourth book.

Can you describe the research you did? You mentioned The Perfect Wife.

That was my biggest influence, and that’s the book I recommend to people. If someone says, Oh, American Wife makes me curious to learn more about Laura Bush, I would definitely urge them to read Ann Gerhart. I read another biography of Laura Bush by Ronald Kessler. I read a book by Frank Bruni called Ambling into History: The Unlikely Odyssey of George W. Bush about Bush’s first presidential campaign. I read Hillary Rodham Clinton’s autobiography, which I enjoyed much more than I thought I would. I read a book called For Love of Politics: Inside the Clinton White House by Sally Bedell Smith. I interviewed some people who worked in the White House. Because the book takes place primarily in Wisconsin, I ordered 1960s Wisconsin yearbooks off eBay, and I interviewed people from Wisconsin. For the Princeton stuff I talked to Princeton librarians. And I interviewed friends and family members who I thought had expertise on any topic that might be relevant to the book.

How about the sex in the book? I was reminded of something you said about Prep, that it might not be your parents’ cup of tea for various reasons, and the graphic sex was part of that. It’s
quite a visual, the sex in American Wife.

Actually, for Christmas last year I gave my parents a special copy of the book that had all the sex scenes cut out. Then when some of the sex scenes were put up by websites in July—which was very misrepresentative of the book—my dad stumbled upon them and I basically said, You know, I tried to protect you from that, and if you sought it out on your own, that has to be your concern, not mine. I mean, the book is about a thirty-year marriage, so of course there’s sex.

And realistically, there’s less of it as it goes on.

Exactly. And I know the distinction is hard for people to make, but I do not feel like I wrote a novel about Laura and George Bush. I feel like I read things about them that inspired me to create fictional characters, and then these fictional characters lead their own lives and have their own interactions. So this is not a book about Laura Bush’s sex life.

I’ve read that you didn’t expect Prep to get the kind of reception that it did. But American Wife was coming into an environment where it would get a lot of attention precisely because it is so relevant. Was the run-up to publication different? Did it feel different as you were writing?

To me the question when I was writing was, one, will I finish it, ever? That’s a question that a lot of novelists ask themselves while writing. And, two, will I feel like it’s good enough that I’ll want it to be published? Those were the questions I was focused on. The fact is that in this day and age I don’t think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention. There are books that have pretty provocative subjects that disappear without a trace. I would say that already it’s gotten more attention than I anticipated. At the same time I think it’s probably the most commercial book that I’ll ever write. It has the most obvious hook of any book that I’ll write.

Looking for More Great Reads?
21 Books You’ve Been Meaning to Read
Back to Top