Mrs. Nixon

Ann Beattie

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 as "interchangeable with a Martian." But 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 Nicon'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 fascination and intimate account offers readers an unprecedented glimpse into the imagination of a writer.