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Hello and welcome to Slate's Audio Book Club.

I'm Megan O'Rourke, the magazine's Culture Critic.

And with me today are Katie Roifie, author and professor at NYU, and Julia Turner, Slate's deputy editor.

Thanks for joining me.

Hi, Megan.

Hi. Today we're discussing American

Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld, who is also the author of Prep and Man of My Dreams. It's a kind of

500-plus page saga about the formation of the character of a young Wisconsin woman named Alice

Blackwell, who eventually winds up becoming the wife of the

President of the United States. It is also distinctive because it is apparently, or it is, a lightly

fictionalized version of Laura Bush's life. Curtis Sittenfeld has described the book as being

85% fiction and sort of 15% drawn from Laura Bush's life.

But as I'm sure we'll talk about, a lot of the contours of the story really are drawn from

Laura's wife and her, the man she marries, a kind of rapscallion named Charlie Blackwell,

who comes from a preppy family that has an enormous sprawling bush-like compound. And a political legacy.

...