Ann Beattie: Mrs. Nixon

Bookworm

KCRW

Arts

4.5 • 606 Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2011

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

With little known about Pat Nixon, Ann Beattie decided to write a novel in the form of a writer's manual, she used Mrs. Nixon as a model of how to create a character.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.
0:04.3	Boots!
0:09.5	Where would we be without boos?
0:13.1	Where would we be without good?
0:15.3	No, Tinty Bird.
0:16.8	It's a rhetorical question, sir.
0:20.2	But where would we be without books?
0:23.7	From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblant, and this is Bookworm.
0:29.6	Today, I'm very excited to have, as my guest, Anne Beatt, the last time we spoke to Anne,
0:36.4	it was a kind of valedictory show about her past stories.
0:40.7	We were reminiscing about them. But now Anne has stepped off a balcony into thin air with her new book, which is called Mrs. Nixon.
0:51.6	A novelist imagines a life.
0:58.5	No one knows yet what to do with this book.
1:03.4	Do we give it to biographers, political biographers?
1:05.7	Do we give it to nonfiction writers?
1:06.7	Is it a novel?
1:09.6	Where should it be put in the bookstores?
1:14.6	It's the strangest thing I've read in many, many years.
1:18.6	Very funny, very moving, very melancholy.
1:22.8	And it's a new and B.D.
1:25.3	Why Mrs. Nixon had?
1:30.3	I guess if Julia Child was still alive, we could give it to her and she could cook a chicken.
	...

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