American Wife

A Novel

De: Curtis Sittenfeld

Narrado por: Kimberly Farr

New York Times best seller.

Named one of the 10 best books of the year: Time, People, and Entertainment Weekly.

A kind, bookish only child born in the 1940s, Alice Lindgren has no idea that she will one day end up in the White House, married to the president. In her small Wisconsin hometown she learns the virtues of politeness, but a tragic accident when she is 17 shatters her identity and changes the trajectory of her life. More than a decade later, when the charismatic son of a powerful Republican family sweeps her off her feet, she is surprised to find herself admitted into a world of privilege.

And when her husband unexpectedly becomes governor and then president, she discovers that she is married to a man she both loves and fundamentally disagrees with - and that her private beliefs increasingly run against her public persona. As her husband’s presidency enters its second term, Alice must confront contradictions years in the making and face questions nearly impossible to answer.

Named one of the best books of the year: The New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, NPR, Rocky Mountain News, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Washington Post Book World.

©2008 Curtis Sittenfeld (P)2008 Random House, Inc.

Reseñas de la Crítica

"A gorgeously written novel that weaves class, wealth, race, and fate into a brilliant portrait of a first lady. (From the author of Rodham and Eligible)

“Terrific...an intelligent, bighearted novel about a controversial political dynasty.” (Entertainment Weekly)

American Wife

This was a very good book. It was most intertaining and I would recommend it to any one who enjoys reading. Well written!!!

The amazing creation of the wife’s persona— a strong support and love for a husband who views she does not share.

The narrator’s voice was spot on. The perfect soft tone of clear-thinking and measured cadence.

Excellent book, limited recording

This is one of my favorite books, but I felt the abridgment of the story for the audio version gave the characters—especially the main character—limited depth. For this reason I recommend the print version above the audio.

A rendering of life inside politics

American Wife was an interesting look at life on the inside of politics, and a slice of what life inside the White House may be like. I found the narration of this book to be excellent, the reader had a quality of excellence you would expect from a first lady. Also fascinating is that the American Wife is modeled after Laura Bush, so you are privy to what might be going on in Laura and George's marriage away from the press and out of the public eye. The story will keep you entertained, and might change the way you think of first ladies!

Each of Us Must Endure, Our World Filled With Changes

This story, written by Curtis Sittenfeld, was brilliantly written. I enjoyed listening and learning so many things about our ever changing world, both about past generations and about issues that are still relevant today.

My favorite, was listening to the narrator, Kimberly Farr. Her voice is so clear and lovely that towards the end of this book, I wished there were more chapters left and that I could listen to her express the writers insights for much longer than when the story ends. This book becomes greater because of this narrator. Bravo, Kimberly Farr. 🎉🤗🙏

Really good!

This book is patterned after Laura Bush, so I was excited to get into it. Great story and narration and I highly recommend this one!

The similarities of Barbara Bush and Alice.

The mystery of where the information came from. There was a genuinely factual concept to this story.

A good listen

This was a really good book. To hear one's life from being a child to a grownup made me reflect on my life and listening to her describe the ups and downs of love, marriage, I think anyone could relate. I enjoyed it.

A Life in Opposition

When Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife was released in 2008 during the closing months of the presidency of George W. Bush, much attention was focused on how the novel was based off the wife of then First Lady Laura Bush. Indeed, that Sittenfeld had what some considered the sheer audacity to build a fictional narrative (really a Roman a clef) atop the First Lady’s life and marriage. That, indeed, was my knowledge of the novel that I’ve carried somewhere in the back of my mind for much of the last fifteen years after (as my memory tells me) I first encountered a review of it in Entertainment Weekly. Having recently come to the novel at long last, it is also something which does the novel something of a disservice.

Because American Wife is far more than just Laura Bush’s life dressed up as fiction.

Don’t get me wrong: the broad strokes are there. The bookish only child of a family in a small town who as a teenager a car accident that kills a fellow high school classmate (a first love never fulfilled thanks to fate). Who then, as a young woman, becomes a school librarian before having something of a whirlwind romance with the black sheep son of a prominent Republican family despite herself being a Democrat. A marriage with ups and downs that includes his alcoholism while managing a MLB team, his (and their daughter’s) becoming a Born Again Christian, and an unlikely road leading to the White House and a presidency that becomes increasingly unpopular. All of which, drawn from the life of Laura Bush, are all present in Sittenfeld’s narrative.

Yet Alice Blackwell, nee Lindgren, and her life have far more to them. Indeed, much of the controversy around American Wife in 2008 dealt with Sittenfeld’s additions and presumed assumptions (including having her future first lady protagonist having an abortion as a teenager in 1963). Time affords distance and it is easier now to see the richly drawn figure that Sittenfeld created in Alice from the basic facts of a real-life person. The story of a woman’s wife, taking us and her older self on a journey which begins with her grandmother and her friendship with a woman doctor in Chicago even before the tragedy that changes Alice’s life forever after. For much of its length, perhaps surprisingly given its reputation, American Wife moves between genres from coming-of-age, romance, and the story of a clearly loving but sometimes difficult marriage as it hits difficulties in middle-age. The story of a life that, as Alice puts on early in the novel, has been lived in opposition to itself. Or is it, given the facts that we learn of her life?

The novel in some ways feels like an answer in fiction to a question that I myself asked from the middle of the Bush presidency onward: What do people see in that guy? The answer is seen through Alice’s eyes of a charming, if not always bright, man. Loving, funny (if sometimes rude), great in bed (described in lurid detail), and who struggles to find a purpose in life. Charlies Blackwell, like Alice, may share plenty in common with the real-life President of the time but is very much a character in his own right. Indeed, to my surprise, there were times I found myself smiling and even laughing at what he had to say. Yet, like his real-life counterpart and Alice herself, it wasn’t hard to understand why their presidency had all but come apart at the seams by its end.

Indeed the closing section has lost little of its relevancy in the past fifteen years. Set late in Charlie’s presidency with an unpopular war in the Middle East raging and a fight to get an anti-choice justice onto the Supreme Court, it becomes the moment that Alice’s past all but comes back to haunt her, along with the choices she’s made. Choices which have, she’s told, contributed to an ever dividing country, thousands of deaths, and the potential loss to a service she herself partook in nearly a half-century earlier. The talking points about the Iraq War may feel quaint now, but in a world where Roe v Wade has been overturned and the culpability of voters in picking a candidate unfit for the Oval Office are ever present issues, American Wife and its commentary continues to have a timely quality to it.

Even if it’s less a political novel and more the story of an unlikely figure sucked into the world of Washington politics, wondering about the life choices that led them to it.

Democratic tale fictionalizing Laura Bush’s life

Disappointed in the negative characterizations of the Bush family from a liberal and secular worldview. Story kept my interest and narrator superb. It seemed the author had a political agenda in writing this book.