Excerpt from American Princess by Stephanie Marie Thornton, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Prologue

Washington, DC

1970

Given the choice, I'd have preferred a sudden heart attack in the Senate audience gallery to this mundane death by surgery.

I squint in vain against the garish hospital lights, the walls a phosphorescent white that blur painfully into the nurses' sterile uniforms. Perhaps even something as dull as dying warm in my own bed would have sufficed. But the villainies of age continue, and I find myself instead subjected to the injustice of a starched hospital gown and the impending threat of a scalpel.

"Are you comfortable, ma'am?"

I'm about to be drugged and butchered. Of course I'm not comfortable, you moonbrain.

I wave away the nurse's inane question with a hand so spotted and gnarled it might have belonged to a Pharaonic mummy. Sometimes I scarcely recognize the white-haired biddy I've become; I miss the hedonistic hellion who smoked foul-smelling cigarettes on the roof of the White House, feted mustachioed German princes and an iron-fisted Chinese empress, and inspired the rage for the color Alice Blue in the spring of 1902.

"I'm fine," I lie to the nurse. "After all, I'm about to become Washington's only topless octogenarian." My voice trembles with age, and if I admit it, a hefty dose of fear even as my pulse thuds in my ears.

I shouldn't be afraid. After all, I've been through this before, almost fifteen years ago—not to mention all the other painful procedures I've undergone over the years—but the cancer returned so now the other breast has to go. I shouldn't be attached to a lump of sagging flesh, or even life itself now that I'm just an old fossil. But I've always drunk greedily from the cup of life, even when it was its most bitter.

At eighty-six years old, I'm not done living.

A warm hand in mine banishes a fraction of my fear. "I'll be waiting outside, Grammy." Joanna's pale brown hair is loose around her face; she looks so like me when I was her age. "I'd sit with you in the operating room if they'd let me."

I pat her hand. "I know you would, darling," I say as the nurse gives the intravenous needle an efficient tap and swabs the inside of my elbow with a cool pad of alcohol. "And if this is the end..."

"I'll have you buried wearing your Cuban pearls, in the plot you picked out right next to her. I swear it." Joanna kisses me on the forehead as the needle pricks the thin flesh of my arm. "But that's not going to happen. Not today."

"If you say so."

I recall as if through a haze receiving those pearls before my wedding day, but then my mind tilts drunkenly as the nurse wheels me into surgery. I think of my father, barrel-chested and booming-voiced even after being shot by a would-be assassin, brandishing the bleeding, undressed bullet wound to a worshipful crowd. My earliest memory pushes its way in, of trying to clamber onto his lap, me frocked in a pink dress while he still wore leather chaps that smelled of the dusty Dakota Badlands. Train whistles shrieked and engines roared as he'd brushed me off and handed me back to my aunt.

"I can't," he'd said even as I reached up empty arms for him. "She has her eyes... I just can't."

Oh, Father...

I've seen sixteen presidents come and go—including my father with his spectacled face chiseled on Mount Rushmore, and my crowd-pleasing, fedora-toting cousin Franklin. Yet, they're all gone and I'm still here, the other Washington Monument.

Where on earth did I even get that name? I scowl, unable to jar loose which journalist dubbed me with the title. I suppose it doesn't matter now.

The terror of the surgical theater brings me back to reality, with its glaring lights and swarm of white-garbed physicians. "We're going to start your anesthesia in a moment, ma'am," one says to me. "Can you count backward, starting from ten?"

Excerpted from American Princess by Stephanie Thornton. Copyright © 2019 by Stephanie Thornton. Excerpted by permission of Berkley Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.