The XX Factor: What women really think.

American Wife

It was striking to see Laura Bush onstage last night after watching Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama speak last week. Laura looked stiff and uncomfortable, despite her smiles; she swiveled her head almost robotically toward and away from the camera, and her eyes had the tight look of someone disconnected from what she was saying. A few weeks ago I was at a dinner party with some people from Texas who used to know Laura Bush pretty well—and who had liked her. They invoked the usual things people invoke when they talk about who the private Laura Bush once was: a funny, smart jazz lover. A sometime smoker who cared a lot about education. And they said the question all her friends kept asking was: How can she stand by and watch as her husband makes so many bad decisions? 

Curtis Sittenfeld's newly released American Wife, a novel about a woman named Alice Blackwell, aims to answer that exact question. Alice is based loosely on Laura Bush. She's a shy, bookish girl from Wisconsin who grows up to be the wife of a jokey born-again former alcoholic who runs for president only to launch a deeply unpopular war. American Wife didn't go very far, in my view, toward dramatizing the inner life of this woman. But it does make you think quite a lot about the peculiarity of being a first lady—an inherently passive role that is both simpler and more complicated than being Sarah Palin or Hillary Clinton-as-candidate. In the book, Alice asks herself, "If I believed I could have made a difference but instead remained silent, then how could I bear it?" Choosing silence at a moment when more and more women are choosing to find their voice on the political stage—and to some degree just succeeding in finding it—must have a special poignancy. Or maybe it's a special kind of complicity. The book did make me wonder what, in her case, I would do. On the one hand, I believe a marriage is a private space; on the other, I wouldn't be able to swallow my own feelings in order to "support" my husband without question in the public eye. I'm curious to know what other XXers think—are you sympathetic to Laura or not? Will the role of first spouse change over time, as more couples with "new marriages" take residency in the White House?