How much of “American Wife” is fiction?
I would say probably 85 percent of it is fiction. There’s nothing I know about the Bushes that the average person couldn’t find in a published book. Some say your book is what liberals hope Laura Bush is actually like. I don’t think my book has a particular agenda. I don’t know the inner secrets of Laura Bush, and I don’t think it matters that much if she’s actually more or less conservative than her husband—especially at this point. I don’t think that it’s clearly a book for only Democrats or only Republicans. It’s more for fiction lovers. Alice Blackwell seems very suppressed as a female character. What’s your philosophy behind that? I just think that people are complicated, both men and women. It happens that I write more about women. In a lot of ways, [“American Wife” is] a book about marriage, and every marriage involves compromise, and some marriages involve lots and lots of compromise. And I think Alice Blackwell does compromise more than most, but I don’t think she’s a martyr.
