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A Novelist Imagines a Life
by 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: "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.
"Starred Review. Beattie has created a resplendent paean to the pleasures of the literary imagination, and a riveting and mischievous, revealing and revitalizing portrait of an overlooked woman." - Booklist
"Celebrated short story writer Beattie... juxtaposes a master class on writing fiction with fiction itself... it is obvious how much fun Beattie is having with this project - an ideal book for readers who want to understand process as much as product." - Publishers Weekly
"Self-indulgent though fitfully intriguing." - Kirkus Reviews
"Although Beattie clearly did research, this is not a biography. Nor is it entirely fiction. Nor is it literary criticism, as the publisher's advance copy categorizes it. In other words, it's easy to say what it is not, but as to what it is, readers are certain to be left uncertain. Beattie's real strengths are not evident here. For Beattie completists only." - Library Journal
This information about Mrs. Nixon was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ann Beattie has been included in five O. Henry Award Collections, in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for achievement in the short story. In 2005, she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. The former Edgar Allan Poe Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, she is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Maine, Virginia, and Florida.
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