Mrs. Nixon by Ann Beattie

Mrs. Nixon by Ann Beattie

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.

“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”—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

Ann Beattie has published six previous collections of stories such as PERFECT RECALL and six novels including LOVE ALWAYS (Penguin) and FALLING IN PLACE (Penguin). She and her husband, Lincoln Perry, live in Maine and Key West, Florida.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781439168714
ISBN 10	1439168717
Title	Mrs. Nixon
Author	Ann Beattie
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Year published	2011-11-15
Number of pages	304
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.