American Wife

Title: American Wife 2.75 / 5
Author: Curtis Sittenfeld
2008
Began Reading: 7/22/2009
Ended Reading: 7/29/2009

Format: CD










What do we know about our First Ladies? Are they fashion icons read, Jackie Kennedy, Nancy Reagan and Michelle Obama? Are they feminists, Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton? Are they dowdy, silver haired matrons? Sorry, Barbara Bush. Apparently, we know nothing.

Did you know one of our FL actually had a sex life prior to being married? {giggling}

American Wife is the fictionalized account of one of our more recent First Ladies. I really don’t want to spoil who she is, but we all believed she was a Stepford Wife. She looked to husband almost robotically. She adored him and yet seemed so bored with him. He seemed on every level to be her intellectual inferior, yet they meshed like glue.

Alice Lindgren was a good girl, with a rather ordinary life. She grew into a woman who was bound to be only average, until she met Charlie. Charlie Blackwell. The trust fund son of meat manufacturers. Charlie, as in good time; was the dashing debonair love of Alice’s life. She sort of met him on a humble and he kind of stuck.

American Wife could have easily turned into a fairy tale. Boy meets girl. Pretty, yet ordinary girl is swept off her feet by her dashing charismatic prince. However, Curtis Sittenfeld did not do that. She let us meet and like Alice. She also introduced us to Charlie Blackwell a President most Americans almost hated. She showed us the human side of the man before he became the President. The American Wife also showed the evolution of a marriage. From young and fresh love. To mature, staid, comfortable love. This was by far no fairy tale. Sittenfeld let us endure the pain of heartache and betrayal of trust.

After reading this book I have to look at our FL differently. We put them on an unattainable pedestal. As if these women are saints. We also believe their lives really began on the first Tuesday in November. I know these women are mere mortals like the rest of us, but I can’t help but feel sorry their own lives seem to end when their husbands become Presidents.