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Brooke Gladstone: South Dakota governor Christy Noem is responding to backlash over a story in her upcoming memoir. In the book, Noem says she shot and killed her 14-month-old puppy for bad behavior. From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media, I'm Brooke Gladstone. Every election season, political memoirs abound, often divulging more than intended.

Carlos Lozada: No matter how diligently they present themselves in the most electable light, they always reveal themselves, their insecurities, their fears, their ambitions.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, a novelist imagines the private life of political figures in search of unknowable answers.

Curtis Sittenfeld: What does Laura Bush think of the Iraq war? Does she approve of it and if she doesn't, does she feel complicit?

Brooke Gladstone: How to read a politico on this week's On the Media from WNYC. [music]

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. Micah Lowinger is out this week. I'm Brooke Gladstone. As we near Election Day, voters seek to glimpse the true selves of presidential candidates. To that end, an old clip of Kamala Harris describing her Thanksgiving recipe has gotten a lot of mileage. "You could even do a little rosemary if you want, under the skin with some butter before you're going to cook it so that butter will just melt in there." Well, how about that? She cooks. At the Republican National Convention, the party tried to show Donald Trump's softer side, inviting his granddaughter to share this story.

Kai Trump: To me, he's just a normal grandpa. He gives us candy and soda when our parents aren't looking.

Brooke Gladstone: Then there are the tidbits reporters dig up against the candidate's will.

Speaker 4: Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is now admitting that he abandoned a young dead bear in Central Park.

Brooke Gladstone: Can we ever really know a public figure? That is the question that is animating this hour, which first ran this past May. To answer that question, we ranged across genres, even into fiction, for whatever may offer a true look. Of course, you can always mine for shiny nuggets hiding in carefully curated sound bites or you could go even deeper and read a memoir.

Carlos Lozada: Everybody now should read The Truths We Hold, the memoir of Kamala Harris.

Speaker 2: Former first lady Melania Trump announced she will be releasing her first memoir.

Speaker 5: House Speaker Emerita has a new book out, The Art of Power, an art at which Nancy Pelosi is something of a master.

Brooke Gladstone: One connoisseur of politician lit finds them quite useful, even revelatory. Carlos Lozada is a columnist for the New York Times and author of The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians. Others may pass on these books because they are dull or doorstops. Lozada, however, is a very close reader.

Carlos Lozada: No matter how carefully they sanitize their life stories and their records, no matter how diligently they present themselves in the most favorable and electable light, they always reveal themselves, their insecurities, their fears, their ambitions, whether they really mean to or not. It's not always the big, sexy, newsy material.

Brooke Gladstone: That's the stuff that comes out in the headlines, right?

Carlos Lozada: Yes. That gets covered right away, right. When Barack Obama's memoir comes out, immediately, political reporters pour over it for the news value. The way I try to read them is a little bit different. You know, it may be something very subtle, they say in the acknowledgement section. It may be some small thing they said to a low-level aide, but that's where they really show themselves.

Brooke Gladstone: Give me a couple of examples.

Carlos Lozada: Sure. One of my favorite Obama stories is in another Washington book, not by him, but by one of his former aides. Reggie Love wrote a book called Power Forward. Reggie Love was Obama's personal aide, his bodyman, as they call it. The guy who kind of helps him get from place to place, carries his stuff around. Love recalls a moment when he forgot to bring Obama's briefcase on the plane. This is in his first campaign for the presidency. They were flying to some Democratic primary debate. He thought he was going to get fired, right? Obama forgave him, but he was annoyed about it.

Reggie Love explains why Obama was annoyed. He liked to be seen carrying something off the plane. He said to Regie Love, "JFK carried his own bags."

Brooke Gladstone: That is revealing.

Carlos Lozada: It says so much about how carefully Obama shaped and thought about his image and how he drew on perhaps our most mythologized former president.

Brooke Gladstone: You've also said that omissions can be as revealing as what's actually in the book. One example you gave was Mike Pence's memoir, published in 2022, called So Help Me God. A lot of it was about his actions on January 6, but there's one moment when he describes the video message that Donald Trump put out on January 6.

Carlos Lozada: He quotes extensively from Trump's message when he finally tells the rioters to stand down, and here's how he quotes it in the book. "I know your pain. I know your hurt...but you have to go home now. We have to have peace now." Trump did say those words, but that's not all he said, right? When I looked at that, I thought, "What did Pence cut out with that ellipsis in the middle of the quote?" so I dug up the video. Here's what Trump said, "We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side." Only then does he go on to say, "But you have to go home now. We have to have peace."

Mike Pence, he's still covering for the boss. It's impossible for me to think about Mike Pence's vice presidency without thinking about those three little dots in that quote.

Brooke Gladstone: Which brings us to 2015, when you binge-read eight books by then-candidate Donald Trump, I didn't even know he'd written eight books.

Carlos Lozada: He's written more than eight books. Just those were the ones that I was able to get hold of and read.

Brooke Gladstone: This year, you wrote an op-ed saying that if someone had read those books, they wouldn't have been surprised by the presidency that followed. Shocked, perhaps, but not surprised. What did you know back in 2015 that we might not have realized until 2016 or years after?

Carlos Lozada: Back in 2015, this is just when Donald Trump was suddenly doing very well in the polls in his effort to secure the Republican nomination. I asked my editor, "What if I just read a bunch of his books and see what they say about him?" He said, "That's a great idea, but do it quickly because who knows how long interest in this guy is going to last," right?

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] We talked to somebody at the New York Times. It was David Leonhardt. He said then, "In all honesty, we're going to serve our readers by not spending time on candidates that aren't going to get anywhere," and Donald Trump was among them.

Carlos Lozada: Lo and behold. Often when I read these books, years later, there's basically one or two key things that still stick in my head. He wrote a book in 2004 called How to Get Rich. He drops this really weird passage about his hair. He says, "The reason my hair looks so neat all the time is because I don't have to deal with the elements. I live in the building where I work. I take an elevator from my bedroom to my office. The rest of the time, I'm either in my stretch limousine, my private jet, my helicopter, or my private club in Palm Beach." What does that tell you right, aside from his vanity about his hair?

Brooke Gladstone: He has his finger on the pulse of the American people.

Carlos Lozada: [laughs] Political reporters say that the White House traps presidents in a bubble, but if you read that passage, what you realize is that he has lived in a bubble of his own making for a long, long time.

Brooke Gladstone: As you've noted, a lot of people see what you do as a kind of masochistic enterprise. Are any of these books genuinely like good?

Carlos Lozada: Absolutely. Out of the Obama trilogy, Dreams From My Father, Audacity of Hope, and A Promised Land, it's going to be hard to top the first one, Dreams From My Father. In general, I think when it comes to books by presidents or former presidents, the more distant they are from that person's time in the White House, the better they tend to be. Books by presidents that are straight-up White House memoirs are often both very defensive and very in the weeds. Of the Obama canon, I would say that Dreams From My Father is the strongest. I'll mention two others by presidents. Ulysses Grant's memoirs are fantastic.

Brooke Gladstone: Right. They're famous. I've never read them.

Carlos Lozada: Well worth reading. One of the things I love about it is that really, it's not about the presidency at all. It's about his experience in the Civil War, the Mexican-American war, and just his life. You'd almost be surprised to know the guy in that book went on to be president. He doesn't really have a lot of interest or respect for politics, but it's a very honest account. It's funny, you can tell how much he, like, just couldn't stand Lee and all the great press that Lee got. It may have helped that Mark Twain was his publisher, but he was writing it as he was dying and broke. It's a remarkable story.

Brooke Gladstone: We talked about Obama and about Grant. What's the lesser-known one that is among your favorites?

Carlos Lozada: Jimmy Carter has written four memoirs. His White House memoir is perhaps the least interesting of the four, the best one is called An Hour Before Daylight. I only read it recently when we all learned that Jimmy Carter had gone into hospice care, and it is his story of growing up on his father's farm in Georgia during the Depression. It is beautiful. It was a Pulitzer finalist in biography in the early 2000s. To my mind, it's still my favorite book by a president, as distinct from a presidential memoir.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that when reading a Washington book, always read the acknowledgments?

Carlos Lozada: Absolutely.

Brooke Gladstone: Why?

Carlos Lozada: The acknowledgments are a goldmine of back-scratching, of snubs, of insecurities. I'll give you two examples, one just kind of funny. Another, I think, almost poignant. Marco Rubio wrote a book in 2015 called American Dreams. In the acknowledgments, he starts off thanking two people by name. The first person he thanks by name is "My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, whose willingness to die for my sins will allow me to have eternal life." Wonderful. That's great. The second person he thanks by name is his lawyer.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Who's that?

Carlos Lozada: His lawyer is a very well-known, powerful Washington lawyer named Bob Barnett.

Brooke Gladstone: Oh.

Carlos Lozada: I thought that was wonderful. I thought it did such a great job of capturing the inside-outside game that politicians play. The second example I will give you, I'm sure that you and your listeners, you all saw the coverage of the special counsel report on Joe Biden's treatment of classified documents, right where he was exonerated of any misdeeds. No charges. But in the sort of soundbite that went around the world, the special counsel said he came across as "A well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory." Biden gave a press conference where he tried to address that, didn't go so well. In the course of all that controversy, I was reading Promise Me, Dad, which is the memoir that Biden published in 2017 about his final period as vice president, which coincided with the time of Beau Biden's illness and death.

Brooke Gladstone: His son.

Carlos Lozada: Yes, who died in 2015. One of the issues that was raised in the special counsel report was some question as to whether Joe Biden remembered the precise year of Beau Biden's death. I was reading the acknowledgments of that book, and here is the very first paragraph of the acknowledgments. He says, "This is the story of Beau's death. This story was not an easy one for me to tell. I found it difficult to go back and revisit this time period, and my memories of events were sometimes foggy. There were a number of people I counted on to help me with recall, with the reconstruction chronologies, and with encouragement." I found that so utterly relatable.

Any one of us who has experienced the prolonged illness and death of a loved one knows that sometimes the mind obscures the details of family trauma. I wish he had reread that moment in his own book because I understood it.

Brooke Gladstone: I think a lot of people, with some blockbuster exceptions, mostly find these books as doorstops on the 20% off table in Barnes & Noble. As someone who's consumed the gamut that most of us simply pass by, how would you advise us to sort through them, or can we let you do it for us?

Carlos Lozada: [laughs] If people want to merely rely on my columns and my books as substitutes for reading the Washington books, who am I to tell them not to? I do think theres a lot to be learned from them. If there's a president who you instinctively dislike, maybe check out what he had to say. There's plenty to learn in Washington books that we're just leaving on the discount shelf at Barnes & Noble.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote, "I realize this kind of journalism may seem a bit passive. After all, I'm just reading, but by digging through the books that politicians write, I can help explain, reveal, and understand them. I may not have found that next great American novel, but I hope that reading these texts can help me fill in a little bit more of the great American story."

Carlos Lozada: When I was trying to think about the various scandals surrounding the Trump presidency, I looked back on books about Watergate, books about Iran Contra, books about the Clinton impeachment scandal. There were many similarities with the issues that we were going through in the Trump era, but one thing that struck me was how in those past scandals, the presumption of honesty that people had for the presidency was very important. When it was revealed that Nixon had been lying, that Reagan had skirted the truth around Iran Contra, that Clinton hadn't been honest about his relationship to Monica Lewinsky, that was a big deal, right?

There's a great quote, and I think it's The Final Days by Woodward and Bernstein, which is their second book on Watergate, where Patrick Buchanan is telling some of Nixon's relatives, like, "Look, the tapes reveal that he had been lying to the public, and the president can't lead a nation that he's deceived." The one big difference that I found in the scandals of the Trump era is that that presumption of honesty has been squandered. It's gone. Instead, there's this cynical acceptance of deceit, so reading these books doesn't just tell me about Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump tells me something about the nation that they lead.

Brooke Gladstone: Thank you very much.

Carlos Lozada: Brooke, thank you so much for having me.

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Brooke Gladstone: Carlos Lozada is an opinion columnist for the New York Times and author of The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians. Coming up, a very rare take on a politician, a novel drawn equally from firsthand experience and the imagination. This is On the Media.

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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Vincent Cunningham is a New Yorker staff writer and theater critic, but before he was a journalist, he worked in politics. First on Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and then in his White House. He could have written a political memoir about those days. Instead, he wrote a novel. It's called Great Expectations, about a young man named David Hammond on the campaign staff of a man both charismatic and remote, mostly referred to as the candidate. Earlier this year, Cunningham explained how much that character mirrored the real Obama.

Vincent Cunningham: Well, he is most remarkable for his illegibility. In my book, he is this screen upon which many different kinds of people from many different kinds of places, with different motivations, different life stories, and different destinations in the end, all of them could project. The keyword back then was hopes, but also their neuroses, secret ambitions, and, yes, their attempts to build an identity, in the case of the main character, David Hammond. All of that could be projected onto this canvas that is the candidate.

Brooke Gladstone: How do they differ, your Obama and the real one?

Vincent Cunningham: Well, they don't differ very much. I've always thought of the way that fiction can take someone that we think we know and present a different version is really a matter of angles, almost like camera angles. The Obama of the true 2008 campaign was a protagonist who had his say. The candidate in my novel is someone who is looked at and projected upon. That's really the difference, but there are many similarities, right? He has a pastor that sounds a lot like Jeremiah Wright, if people remember that episode.

Vincent Cunningham: Right, Jeremiah Wright, who scared a lot of white people.

Vincent Cunningham: Well, yes, famously, goddamn America was his friend, so there's a lot that these figures hold in common. Oddly, even though he is the one who is driving the world historical action by running for president, the candidate of my text is a kind of passive figure. The object of wishes, but not their author.

Brooke Gladstone: You've said, "here are seeds of truth you seek to make more meaningful through fiction." Apply that to what you did.

Vincent Cunningham: For example, my biography is a lot like David Hammon's. He grew up where I grew up, has known people like I've known. He read the books that I've read. [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: He had the same religious upbringing you did because a struggle with belief plays an important role in your book.

Vincent Cunningham: A struggle with belief, and also an attempt to make one system of belief parallel with another. How the process of politics entails a similar structure of belief.

Brooke Gladstone: Enlarge on that.

Vincent Cunningham: Well, sure. My parents were both very devoted Pentecostal.

Brooke Gladstone: The way that David's background was?

Vincent Cunningham: It was even more complicated than David's. My parents met in the Baptist church, in a choir that my mom sang, and my dad was the musical director of. Then when I was three years old, my father, being a musician, got a job at a Catholic church. We moved to Chicago, and I was Catholic from the ages of three to nine. Then just before my father died, we moved back to New York. Then, my mother and I joined the Pentecostal church. To answer your prior question, this has given me and David Hammond, the protagonist of my novel, a fairly fine-grained understanding about how people believe.

How they are, as we say, converted, how they persist in their beliefs, what the process of disillusionment looks like, and how disillusionment is not like a cessation of belief, but a dramatic passage in the action of someone's life in belief. All of that drama that comes purely inside ourselves about what we hold to be true, or as the founders say, self-evident. That is thrilling to me. Fiction can be about the movement not of a body through space, but of a psyche through its life.

Brooke Gladstone: You said that, "Novels that draw from life are a better way to track truth."

Vincent Cunningham: Well, because you can mold action using some things that are true, some things that are not, into a shape that makes sense to you. Once fact is not an obstacle, what you're left with is meaning. The meaning in our lives is often so different from what actually happens. All of us know that when we show up at work in the morning, we've been through a whole drama that has nothing to do with anybody we've seen or anything we've done. It has happened in our subconscious minds, in our dreaming, in our reorientation as we wake.

Our minds often create patterns, and the process of making untrue things true in the life of a book is a way of adding deeper, more resonant stakes to the true action of our lives. I think that's why it's a more harrowing kind of truth because it involves not just what we did and what we said, but also what we thought and what we hoped.

Brooke Gladstone: There's so much self-disclosure in this book. Were there moments of hesitation when writing your protagonist because he mirrored so much of your experience?

Vincent Cunningham: I can't think with that mind while I'm writing. I've thought about that more over the past couple of weeks. All of a sudden, people are calling me and being like, "Hey, did that really happen?" I'm like, "Actually, no, it didn't," or I'm like, "Okay, yes, that kind of did." While I wrote it, I was trying to make a story using the materials of my life as the paint and the canvas and all that." I didn't have time to think about it back then. Now I'm like, "Oh, wow. What have I done?" [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: There's vivid imagery in Great Expectations, down to the condensation on the walls.

[laughter]

Brooke Gladstone: Your doppelganger is a keen observer, trying to figure out who he is or wants to be. He does that by studying others and the choices they make.

Vincent Cunningham: Yes. One of the joys of my life of reading novels is the opportunity that it creates for paying attention. That profusion of noticing, those were the parts of this book that I've had the most fun doing.

Brooke Gladstone: The oratory of Obama is what drew so many Americans to him. Your narrator is captured by the candidate's ease with talking about faith in a way that reminded him of his pastor.

Vincent Cunningham: Obama, his graspings after meaning his search for an identity, one step along the way was the Black church. Trinity in Chicago, social justice-oriented liberationist congregation pastored by Jeremiah Wright, was part of his creation of an African American identity that he didn't necessarily get from his upbringing. Whose sounds and rhythms often are made manifest through the Black church and the many musics that it has brought into being, is something that he learned and was therefore very attuned to. The expertise of the outsider is different than the lived-in expertise of the insider, right? You could feel all of the efforts of his study.

He was the possessor of those rhythms. He earned them. Having been native to them myself, I could hear that. Not only the rhythms, but the effort in their acquisition. It was something that interested me about him.

Brooke Gladstone: David Hammond says that he was never able to really "to arrive at a stable opinion of nature or, at the bottom, the sincerity of his oft-mentioned Christian faith," that is the candidate. "He seemed, even in his own well-honed telling, to have joined this church, to root himself socially within a recognizably Black community, not necessarily in response to some deep and irrepressible metaphysical urge. No shame there," he writes. What is religion especially in those first beautiful days of belief, but the acknowledgement of an agreement among people?

Vincent Cunningham: Catholics, in their vast vocabulary for God, one of the phrases that I love is that God is the ground of being, the stable surface that makes it all possible, right? That has always appealed to me deeply because I think about friendship, for example, or just you and I got on this recording and were able to talk and joke and laugh even before we turned on the recordings. That has to do with some deep agreement, whether it be biographical or something in our temperament, especially with humor, right? You have to have so much in common with someone to make a joke because the joke rests on so much sediment beneath it.

I love that feeling of deep agreement, and this is why I like to meet people. You surprise yourself with how much goes wordless, but because of the implicitness of our samenesses, so much can grow on top of that. I mean, if that's a definition for God, then sign me up. I think that the skillful politician is a manager of those samenesses. Someone who can say, "This is how we are alike." That is a kind of politics, and it's also a kind of religion. I've always loved being part of a congregation. When people start to sing together, oh, we all know that song. It makes me want to cry every time.

Brooke Gladstone: What did you learn from writing this novel, from working on this campaign, from being an erstwhile speech writer yourself, about the power of rhetoric and its limits?

Vincent Cunningham: Well, yes, rhetoric asks the question, how are we in the same boat? How are our destinies linked? That is the amazing thing and also the terrifying thing about rhetoric. Rhetoric creates groups, and groups become mobs sometimes, but sometimes they become movements. All of a sudden, you're in a group with somebody that you don't know, and you got to figure out why that speech spoke to you. It might not be the same reason that I think, but a good speech can make you understand why you're more like a different person that you kind of thought was off to the side.

Brooke Gladstone: It was so funny when you just said, "Sometimes that speech talks to you." You sounded just like Obama.

[laughter]

Vincent Cunningham: I grew up with him. There you go.

Brooke Gladstone: You've said you're addicted to oratory. It was the first thing you tried to learn to read.

Vincent Cunningham: If you grow up in church, imagine for a listener who hasn't been to church but has listened to politics. Imagine attending a speech every week. Not only was it the first kind of thing that I thought of as a literary event worthy of my own effort, but it was also the first thing that I ever tried to edit. If you are subject to as many sermons as I have been, at a certain point, you'll be like, "He should have said that. He missed this part of the text." I mean, this is part of why I'm a critic. I would sit back and say, "This word would have made that rhythm go better and develop my own theory of the sermon." When I teach any of my writing classes, I always, early in the semester, include a speech because it is the most obvious way to learn to craft an argument.

Brooke Gladstone: Not everyone in your novel is convinced of rhetoric's power. Take Beverly, a campaign fundraiser, a hard charger, often a critic of the candidate's long speeches.

Vincent Cunningham: [laughs] Well, in creating Beverly, who is, on some level, she might be my favorite character in this book. One thing that I wanted to capture was us young, 20 something staffers and there were people just ten years older than us who said, "Well, slow down. Not everybody's going to be as besotted by this as you are." Also, if you think back to that time, especially during the primary, Hillary Clinton, she would make fun of the hope thing. She's like, "Oh, all of a sudden, the waters are going to part and the oceans will cool."

I remember this one speech where she was laying it on pretty thick, that wasn't just Clinton, and it wasn't just her supporters. Many people had this reservation about Obama, and I wanted to make that manifest in one of my characters, and so Beverly, who's all about power, she wants to track the movements of power.

Brooke Gladstone: She said, "Everybody talks about how he'll change race in America, erase it or whatever. When the real thing is, how about you get some power and then use it?"

Vincent Cunningham: It makes a lot of sense. It doesn't make for a good political speech, but at the end of the day, that is the ground of politics, the acquisition of power. One function of high flown rhetoric is to cloak that under layers of feeling, often reasonable and warranted feeling. It is good to sometimes pull that blanket away and look at politics for what it is.

Brooke Gladstone: Would you say that David was naive?

Vincent Cunningham: Well, he's expressing this desire to understand the campaign, not through, like, will they win? Won't they win? But what is, as he calls it, its coded, total meaning, and read it like one reads a novel. I can admit that this is one of the problems of my life, right, that I can't just experience something. I'm always trying to break it down as an abstraction and get it all into my head. That is a kind of naivete because life is this onrushing flood. Its one true quality is that it is ungraspable in all of its details. The moment that you try to do that, you're doing something like art. Trying to rove through it and pull from it a certain kind of meaning, but to do that is, of course, to leave parts out.

That is sad to me.

Brooke Gladstone: Sad?

Vincent Cunningham: That, in fact, there are more moments that I don't remember than I do remember. That, to me, is terrifying. A kind of death before I die, and this is maybe why I'll never be quite the hard-edged Beverly. Even if maybe I agree with her, I more than I agree with David Hammond. My desire to make art is precisely an attempt to retrieve as much of life as I can.

Brooke Gladstone: The other big theme in the book is David's striving to become something, an effort that was hamstrung in part by his upbringing. Could you turn to page 196?

Vincent Cunningham: Absolutely.

Brooke Gladstone: We will read call and response.

Vincent Cunningham: John 3, this is very Bible, the textual reference. I love it.

Brooke Gladstone: "When looking for clues," says David, "Into the sources of my own passivity."

Vincent Cunningham: When looking for clues into the sources of my own passivity, my odd relationship to effort, I think of scenes like this one. I was raised in an atmosphere of magic, christened into unrealism, made to feel most at home amid excruciating cognitive dissonance, the kind that never resolved. I believed and didn't believe and felt the strain. The people I knew were and weren't real did what they shouldn't do without jettisoning the orthodoxies that should have made them ashamed. God knows how, but I guess that's all of us."

Brooke Gladstone: Which brings us back to Obama. It's his rhetoric that helped get him elected. Two very different presidents later, is he still a symbol?

Vincent Cunningham: It's so strange. Usually for me, at least, when someone who was the president is no longer president, they become more legible, right? We know who Jimmy Carter is, the good guy. Usually presidents come from a sort of archetypal background, right? The man from a place called Hope, Bill Clinton, or the C student of a preppy family, George W. Bush. We understand them as archetypes in the beginning, and they retreat almost into those archetypes, becoming more and more legible as they age. I don't know if that's true about Obama. I understand him less than I thought I did. A Netflix guy? I have been consistently surprised by his choices.

I think he's just as well intended as I thought he was before, but the meaning that he was so skillful at managing, it's kind of slipped away. He'll certainly always be the first Black president, which means something. He'll certainly always be cool, right, which means something. Maybe he represents a last gasp of, as you mentioned, naivete and innocence before the country reached a kind of apocalypse. I don't know. Lots of people who've read this book come back to me to saying, "Wow, I just got so sad thinking about how hopeful we were." Being transported back to that time represents a final gasp of something. I can't say if he's a symbol, what he's a symbol of.

Brooke Gladstone: In the end, David is less impressed with the candidate the more he understands the symbols he offered. He calls him a moving statue. He mattered and he didn't. Just as David said his own history mattered and didn't. He wanted to be more legible than symbol, more real. The book ends with him pulling out his phone and taking a picture.

Vincent Cunningham: It's another one of those cognitive dissonances, moments of strain that I feel all the time in my attempts to capture and to understand more of my life. In the end, I think this book's attention to art and to politics and to other dimensions of life is about that struggle. Digging through surfaces, trying to access the real. So many things in our lives offer us a the shovel to do that right. Religion offers us access to the real. Politics says "No, power. This is access to the real." Social movements, this is it. Even science, but it's really this impossible thing that takes a whole lifetime. Maybe life is the most spectacular failure at this attempt, but the only people that I'm interested in are the people that keep trying to do that.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for this book, Vincent.

Vincent Cunningham: Brooke, thank you for this conversation.

Brooke Gladstone: Vincent Cunningham is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where he also co-hosts a podcast called Critics at Large. His novel is Great Expectations.

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Brooke Gladstone: Finally, the deepest of dives into the consciousness of a public figure that the novelist never even met. This is On the Media.

Vincent Cunningham: Yes, we can.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. When puzzling over public figures, we can turn to biographies, memoirs, and even novels penned by people who were, as the song goes, "In the room where it happened," but where do we go when the public record is too sparse to examine? Curtis Sittenfeld has written several novels exploring the minds of public figures that were fueled from the media ether or her own imagination, and they are startlingly convincing. In 2020, she published Rodham, an alternate history of what Hillary Clinton's life might have been if she hadn't married Bill. In 2008, Sittenfeld authored American Wife, inspired by former First Lady Laura Bush.

In that earlier book, the character based on the First Lady is called Alice and follows her life from early childhood to her ambivalent entry into the storied Blackwell family, based on the Bushes. We spoke in May about the mysteries that inspired her to write American Wife.

Curtis Sittenfeld: The essential unanswered question was, what does Laura Bush think of George W. Bush? What does she think of the Iraq war? Does she approve of it? And if she doesn't, does she feel complicit?

Brooke Gladstone: Why did you care what she thought?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Something that made a big impression on me is that she would hold these literary salons at the White House early on in her husband's first term and that she would invite writers who were on the record as politically disagreeing with him. They might think, "Oh, she's not familiar with my work, but she's trying to seem literary." Then they would go and they would find out that she had read everything they'd ever written and was very conversant in it. That's super interesting. There was just, like, little facts about her, including many that I read in Anne Gerhardt's biography. Like, she liked to fly Southwest and go to informal Tex-Mex restaurants. She was supposed to be very unpretentious and low-key and there was this knee-jerk view of her as like a Stepford wife.

Brooke Gladstone: Well, it was known that she was in favor of abortion rights.

Curtis Sittenfeld: There can be public facts out there that do not penetrate people's consciousness. Yes, I think that a public figure who seems to embody certain contradictions is just a more dramatic version of the rest of us because we all have inner conflict.

Brooke Gladstone: Right? You created such a plausible character. At least half the book, if not more, doesn't have anything to do with Bush or his political career. That seemed to be part of the point. We learned about what shaped Alice, her trials and her traumas, and most notably, the tragic event drawn from the life of real-life Laura when she was a teenager and she killed a high school friend in a car accident. This high school friend was incredibly important to the fictional character. Of course, I want to know how close was this character to the real-life Laura.

Curtis Sittenfeld: She ran a stop sign. Who among us hasn't run a stop sign? If something terrible had happened, how could a person not be haunted by that? So I thought, "Of course, she's haunted by it," but as I'll say many times, I do not know Laura Bush.

Brooke Gladstone: It sure seems like I know her now from your book. Given what we know of Alice, her first and evolving impressions of Charlie Blackwell, drawn from George W. Bush, they're so plausible, given what we've experienced through her eyes as a child. Later, she's captivated by his easygoing, self-assured charm, and she's also rather indifferent to his rich, high-profile political family. What did you learn about George in writing this book? I mean, you did research into him, too. You imagine that he's afraid of the dark, literally.

Curtis Sittenfeld: That's definitely made up.

[laughter]

Curtis Sittenfeld: I am afraid of the dark. I often think that being a fiction writer is like being a desperate but resourceful little bird building your nest, and it's like partly twigs and partly garbage. I really am in dialogue with real events and in imaginary dialogue with real people, but it is a novel. It is made up. It's supposed to make a reader think about what is it to be a person? How do we end up living the lives we live, but it's also supposed to be entertaining.

Brooke Gladstone: It's only very much later when your character Alice realizes that Charlie's clan saw him as a lightweight, as a bit of a loser. The extremely intimidating Priscilla, your stand-in for the matriarch Barbara Bush, suggests that their engagement came as a surprise because in choosing the smart and serious Laura, George was clearly and unexpectedly marrying up. Suddenly Laura's asking, Did the Blackwells think Charlie was incompetent and foolish? Did everyone?"

Curtis Sittenfeld: That is something that, again, you can read articles about the Bush family that it seems like George W. Bush was not the son who is expected to be president.

Brooke Gladstone: Fiction, you've said, is speculation based on two years of research, and it's very careful gossip.

Curtis Sittenfeld: Ha, yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, I want you to turn to page 518.

Curtis Sittenfeld: That alone, someone might be like, "Oh, wait, but 518? Never mind."

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Okay, so at this point, Alice is grappling with the role she's expected to play in her husband's political life, and she's wavering between denial and guilt about her own part in his career. She says, "I can change people's lives, and many times, although it is cowardly, I have wished I didn't have that ability." Can you pick it up from there?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Yes. "And the hardest part is not that what I do is insufficient in others' eyes, but that it's insufficient in my own. I stay busy, I travel, I try with my visits, with my actions. That is more than my words to support other people's good work, but I don't doubt that I'd have felt better about my contributions to the world if my power were more modest later on."

Brooke Gladstone: She says, "I could have lived a different life, but I lived this one. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that I married a man who would neither fault me nor even be aware of my failings. I married a man to whom I would compare favorably because if I have done little, he's done less or perhaps more. If I had caused harm accidentally and indirectly, he's done so with qualmless intent and total confidence." There's an important confrontation between Alice and Charlie. She calls him from the back of a car to tell him that she's met with a veteran whose son has died in the Iraq war and that she told him she herself wanted the troops to come home, which created a big rift. What led you to write that? How much of this book is a wish fulfillment?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Probably a very significant amount. She was believed to be a Democrat until she married into the Bush family at the age of 32. Did she always vote for him? Probably, but I don't know.

Brooke Gladstone: Alice didn't.

Curtis Sittenfeld: Right. Spoiler alert. Did Laura Bush always vote for George W. Bush? I would say it's highly likely, but if I've wondered, it's much more interesting and dramatic to let it play out in fiction that this stand-in for her didn't.

Brooke Gladstone: She tells us, "All I did was marry him. You're the ones who gave him the power."

Curtis Sittenfeld: Well, it's true, right?

Brooke Gladstone: I'm wondering why you changed the name of Laura Bush's character in American Wife, whereas, in Rodham, you used Hillary and Bill's real names.

Curtis Sittenfeld: American Wife is supposed to say, "Here are some major events from the life of Laura Bush, and I'm taking these as a point of departure and then trying to imagine how the world looks to someone like her in these very intimate ways that we probably will never know." It's very speculative, but it is grounded in real events. Whereas Rodham is an alternate history, so, as in real life, Hillary and Bill meet and fall in love at Yale Law School. She follows him back to Arkansas, where he's making his first congressional run. He asks her to marry him twice, and she says no.

In real life, he asked her a third time, and she says yes. In Rodham, he asks her a third time, and she says no, and so there's a split in the timeline. I felt you understood that everything from this point forward is fiction, so I don't need to change the names. If I change the timeline and change the names, you might wonder, "Is this really a novel about Hillary, or is this just a novel about a woman in politics?" I did it for clarity, but I made discoveries by doing it that I hadn't anticipated. Like, it turns out that, without question, readers prefer changed names.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Why?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Okay, I'll tell you why, sex scenes. People like the sex scenes in American Wife, and they don't like the sex scenes in Rodham. I think it's because "And then Bill, you know, caressed my shoulder," except the word isn't shoulder.

Brooke Gladstone: You've noticed that novels based on public figures can make people feel more uncomfortable than fictionalized accounts on TV or film. I wonder, is it because the novel is more intimate, it takes up more resonance in the people's brains than a director's sound and pictures?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Maybe it's that it's written in the first person. Also, there is something very undeniable or concrete about words on the page.

Brooke Gladstone: I just think it requires more audience participation.

Curtis Sittenfeld: Yes, it's almost like if you're showing a sex scene, it can just be two characters embracing or lying in a bed together. If you're writing it, are you going to say penis? Are you going to say erection? Actually, I think a lot of different people have a ick reaction to any word for genitals that is not the word they use.

Brooke Gladstone: You got mocked for the sex scenes of between Bill and Hillary in Rodham, right? You told the Guardian that it felt radical to write about sex from Hillary's point of view because we all knew about Bill and sex. You heard criticisms that maybe it wasn't your right to reclaim that as a novel. Don't you have the right to do anything?

Curtis Sittenfeld: Amen. Yes, you do. I know there is something hilarious. Over my career, people will say, "Did you have to get permission to write this?" I'll think, "Do you know how writing novels work? Would I have applied to the Bureau of Novel Writing?" I'm glad to live in a country where, for the time being, it's still permissible for me to choose the topic.

Brooke Gladstone: We're trying to sort out the different kinds of political novels and what their purposes are. Have you got any thoughts?

Curtis Sittenfeld: There can be a difference between an insider's novel and an outsider's novel. Just in terms of the books that I personally want to write, I think it's to my advantage that I'm an outsider. I don't feel afraid that I won't be invited to some party in Washington, DC. I live in Minnesota. I would never be invited to anyone's party in Washington, DC, and the same with writing my recent Saturday Night Live novel, where I don't feel afraid that Lorne Michaels is not going to greenlight my idea for a sitcom because I don't have an idea for a sitcom and I don't know Lorne Michaels.

I think that's liberating. Although, I also will say people who are insiders certainly have access to many more juicy details or firsthand experiences than I do.

Brooke Gladstone: Why do you think you've been so drawn to exploring the minds and the lives of political figures in fiction?

Curtis Sittenfeld: When I was in graduate school, I had a professor who would say, "Fiction is this conversation between the reader and the writer." I feel like if the reader already has familiarity with the subject of the fiction, that conversation is richer and more complex. If you and I are talking and I'm telling you about my friend, we can have some interesting conversation, but if you know that friend, it's a much more complicated, in a good way, conversation and you can contribute. If I write a novel about Hillary Clinton, I know you know who Hillary Clinton is, and I know you probably have an opinion, and I, as the writer can maybe challenge that or that's something that we can explore together.

Brooke Gladstone: Maybe that's why Moby Dick didn't get off the ground. There's too much about the whale.

Curtis Sittenfeld: [laughs]

Brooke Gladstone: It didn't initially. [laughs] Curtis, thank you very much.

Curtis Sittenfeld: Thank you.

Brooke Gladstone: Curtis Sittenfeld's latest novel is Romantic Comedy. She's also the author of American Wife and Rodham.

[MUSIC-- Let's Impeach the President- Neil Young]

Neil Young: Let's impeach the President then for lyin'

And misleading our country into war.

Brooke Gladstone: That's the show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Heloise Blondio is our senior producer, and Katya Rogers is our executive producer. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. Michael Lowinger will be back next week. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

[00:50:45] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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