
In the year 2000 in the closest election in American history Alice Blackwells husband becomes president of the United States. Their time in the White House proves to be heady tumultuous & controversial. But it is Alices own story
- that of a kind bookish only child born in the 1940s Midwest who comes to inhabit a life of dizzying wealth & power
- that is itself remarkable. Alice candidly describes her small-town upbringing & the tragedy that shaped her identity; she recalls her early adulthood as a librarian & her surprising courtship with the man who swept her off her feet; she tells of the crisis that almost ended their marriage; & she confides the privileges & difficulties of being first lady a role that is uniquely cloistered & public secretive & exposed. Alice Blackwell Curtis Sittenfeld has created her most dynamic & complex heroine yet. American Wife is not a novel about politics. It is a gorgeously written novel that weaves race class fate & wealth into a brilliant tapestry. It is a novel in which the unexpected becomes inevitable & the pleasures & pain of intimacy & love are laid bare.