Dazzlingly original, Ann Beatties Mrs. Nixon is a riveting exploration of an elusive American icon and of the fiction writers 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 Nixons 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 Nixons daughter and his doctor to The Haldeman Diaries and Jonathan Schells The Time of Illusion, Beattie reconstructs dozens of scenes in an attempt to see the world from Mrs. Nixons point of view.
