A
Top 20 Booksense Pick for December 2006!
Marjorie
Williams knew Washington from top to bottom. Beloved for
her sharp analysis, elegant prose and exceptional ability to intuit
character, Williams wrote political profiles for the Washington
Post and Vanity Fair that came to be considered the final word on
the capital's most powerful figures. Her accounts of playing ping-pong
with Richard Darman, of Barbara Bush's stepmother quaking with fear
at the mere thought of angering the First Lady, and of Bill Clinton
angrily telling Al Gore why he failed to win the presidency —
to name just three treasures collected here — open a window
on a seldom-glimpsed human reality behind Washington's determinedly
blank façade.
Williams also penned
a weekly column for the Post's op-ed page and epistolary book
reviews for the online magazine Slate. Her essays for these and
other publications tackled subjects ranging from politics to parenthood.
During the last years of her life, she wrote about her own mortality
as she battled liver cancer, using this harrowing experience to
illuminate larger points about the nature of power and the randomness
of life. Marjorie Williams was a woman in a man's town,
an outsider reporting on the political elite. She was, like the
narrator in Randall Jarrell's classic poem, "The Woman at
the Washington Zoo," an observer of a strange and exotic
culture. This splendid collection — at once insightful,
funny and sad — digs into the psyche of the nation's capital,
revealing not only the hidden selves of the people that run it,
but the messy lives that the rest of us lead.
Author’s Note
In Washington...I've always felt right at home....Of course it's
a hive of conformity and caution, but that's part of what I like
about it–about covering it, anyway. The mixture of that
brittle, conservative set of social conventions and all the messy
human stuff that goes on inside and among the people who try to
climb to the top of the heap makes for such rich material. A lot
of my stories (chiefly, my work is writing long, intensive profiles
of people in government and politics) are really about what Washington
admires, and why, and what it says about the political culture....I
love working this seam between the accepted narrative, usually
hammered out between the Washington press corps and its sources,
and the grubby human nature stuff that is nearly always as plain
as the nose on your face. Washington's status codes are charmingly
straightforward: An assistant secretary is better than a deputy
assistant secretary, but sitting next to a deputy assistant secretary
is better than sitting next to a Cabinet member's wife. As in
a Jane Austen novel, it is this very hierarchical, preordained
quality that throws the city's strivings into high relief.
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