Letter from a Reader 6.1.26
Why first ladies' memoirs outsell their husbands', the water bottle as status symbol, and it's unfair to sum up Barbara Pym as a writer of novels about 'drab spinsters pouring tea for the clergy'
First ladies’ memoirs typically outsell their husbands’ by a landslide. The best example: Michelle Obama’s Becoming sold more than 17 million copies versus a paltry 3 million for Barack’s A Promised Land. Other first ladies whose memoirs have trounced their husbands’ include Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, Barbara Bush, and Hillary Clinton.
Sales figures like the Obamas’ have less to do with politics than with the economics of publishing. Women simply read more—and buy more books—than men.
But I’m not holding my breath to see if the third volume of Joe Biden’s memoirs, which he’s crashing out in Rehoboth Beach, Del., can pull off an upset victory over Jill’s second, View from the East Wing, which comes out on June 2.
It would be unfair to say that books by first ladies tend to be as exciting as the annual Easter egg roll on the White House lawn. But I may have hit my nadir as a critic when I reviewed a coffee-table memoir that Barbara Bush wrote in the voice of Millie, the presidential spaniel. Bush’s book had a lot of photos of the dog with members of politically important voting blocs, and I reviewed it in the voice of my childhood beagle, Skippy. In my defense I can say only that other critics had a similar idea. Jim Davis, the creator of Garfield the cat, reviewed Bush’s book for the New York Times Book Review. He did it under the byline “By Garfield” and the title, “Not Bad for a Dog.”
My review of Millie’s Book was my last foray into canine ventriloquism. But it wasn’t the last to describe my disappointment with a first lady’s book.
A few years ago, I reviewed Hillary Clinton’s lackluster first novel, State of Terror, a political thriller written with Louise Penny. It involves a pantsuit-wearing U.S. secretary of state trying to find the killers of three Pakistani nuclear physicists in Paris, London, and Frankfurt before they slaughter any Americans. She travels on official business with her media-mogul daughter and gives her a dangerous task in Iran. A Kirkus reviewer rightly noted that the book treats “a high-stakes global manhunt as Take Our Daughters to Work Day.”
None of it has left me eager to read View from the East Wing. Yes, the book shows that Jill Biden knows the correct noun for a group of starlings, a “murmuration,” Alexandra Jacobs wrote in her New York Times review.
But pundits and tabloids are already leaking the juicy bits, and none may remain untold by the time the book hits stores. The best scene in Clinton’s thriller came when her secretary of state climbed aboard Air Force Three after a failed diplomatic venture in South Korea and immediately took off her Spanx. Does Biden’s memoir have a similarly telling and believable detail? If so, it hasn’t emerged yet.
Quote of the day: The water bottle as a status symbol
“The water bottle is no longer just a water bottle. It is a status symbol. It is an extension of oneself. It is a source of good skin. It can hold 2.2 liters of water and keep it cool for 11 hours. It can be personalized, stylized and bastardized. It is Gen Z’s version of a purse dog, only heavier and less likely to destroy your handbag.
“Everyone has a reusable water bottle: 79 percent of Gen Z carry one.”
Zak Asgard, a freelance writer in London, in “Notes on…Water Bottles,” also published under the title “The Cult of the Water Bottle,” in the Spectator, July 13, 2024
What I’m reading: ‘What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories’
By happenstance, I dropped off clothes at Goodwill on Saturday and headed afterward for its used-book shelves. There I saw that the thrift shop was selling a paperback copy of Laura Shapiro’s biographical essay collection, What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories (Penguin, 2017), portions of which first appeared in The New Yorker. I was planning to write about Jill Biden’s memoir, and first ladies’ stories in general, when I flipped to Shapiro’s table of contents and saw a chapter on Eleanor Roosevelt.
Obviously I had to buy the book. It was a steal at $1.98. And it might help if I couldn’t find a riveting anecdote about how Biden had ripped off her Spanx in a White House bathroom just as the U.S. Marine Corps Band was preparing to play “Hail to the Chief” at a state dinner.
Shapiro is a graceful and intelligent writer who has won the James Beard Journalism Award for her writing about food, and I’ve enjoyed the three chapters I’ve read so far: on Roosevelt, Eva Braun, and Barbara Pym. I hadn’t known that in her meal-planning, Eleanor displayed little of the courage she showed when it came to civil rights and other social-justice issues.
“By all accounts, the food in the Roosevelt White House was the worst in the history of the presidency,” Shapiro writes. Visitors suffered through meals long on items like dry overcooked mutton, desultory salads, watery prune pudding, and “undrinkable” champagne.
The surprise of Shapiro’s chapter on Braun was that nobody knows what Adolf Hitler had for his last meal before his suicide in a bunker under the Reich Chancellery.
“Hitler most probably had a dish of spaghetti with tomato sauce; some accounts add a salad,” Shapiro writes.
From a literary perspective, the chapter on Pym had the most interest. Shapiro eloquently faults a popular view of the British author’s novels as depicting “drab spinsters pouring tea for the clergy while life dwindles away.”
“Yes, there’s tea, there’s clergy, and there are spinsters, but the women are radiant with personality, the clergy are subjected to gentle, persistent ridicule, and the tea plays so many symbolic roles that another writer would have had to create a whole slew of walk-on characters to say what Barbara says with a cup.”
Shapiro develops that point beautifully in a 40-page chapter that alone might endear her book to Pym fans. I’ve read a half dozen of her novels, including her most popular, Excellent Women, and reams of literary criticism about them. But I saw them afresh after reading Shapiro’s essay. No matter how well you think you know Pym, you might, too.
Coming soon to Jansplaining
Why The New Yorker exposé of Belle Burden’s Strangers will torpedo the movie version with Gwyneth Paltrow
The unfair neglect of Sarah Orne Jewett’s fiction
Another installment of the popular series New York Times Book Review Leads: The good, the bad, and the ugly, which highlights winners and sinners in America’s last free-standing book section
Jan Harayda is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book editor of a large newspaper and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. She has written for many national magazines and newspapers and has taught journalism as an adjunct at two U.S. universities.
Selected Notes
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/View-from-the-East-Wing/Jill-Biden/9781668222881
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/29/books/review/jill-biden-memoir-view-from-the-east-wing.html
https://fanfare.pub/why-michelle-obamas-forthcoming-memoir-will-outsell-barack-s-latest-43165c08df54?sk=b5433df6041608fc94b776814016b03c
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46407734
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/16/books/not-bad-for-a-dog.html
https://spectator.com/article/the-cult-of-the-water-bottle/?edition=us
https://slate.com/culture/2017/07/she-dined-on-black-pudding.html
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/317080/what-she-ate-by-laura-shapiro/
You might also like my post on the tone-deafness of Belle Burden’s Strangers, or this one on its evasions and misrepresentations of the truth:
I’ve never read a First Lady’s memoir and frankly don’t know how these sell. I doubt Jill Biden will be honest about any of the things we’d like her to be. I’ve no problem with her but it seems she likes to gloss over anything negative and say, nothing to see here! Which isn’t helpful when you’re trying to sell a book.
The Laura Shapiro book sounds actually interesting! Love a good used bookstore find.
I think your reviewing Bush's Millie memoir in the voice of Skippy is a stroke of genius rather than an embarrassment. Woof!