Which could be just what Laura Bush is like.

Like the heroine of that story, Alice Blackwell is an outsider who understands the insiders better than they do, a silent humorist whose best lines are reserved for herself (or those who can see inside her head), an aching romantic who’s constantly reminding herself of reality. The plot of the story is obviously rather ordinary what struck me was the fine-spun detail: The author-I assumed it was a man-had captured exactly the queasy forced jocularity of what I used to call 'mandatory fun,' as well as the precariousness of the recent graduate’s maturity and the stubborn loneliness of striking out on your own. The story was about a young woman temping in some kind of white-collar office after college there’s an office party and some drunken co-worker co-mingling. We met after I’d run across a short story she’d written in a literary quarterly and asked her to contribute to Feed. She is, actually, a lot like Curtis Sittenfeld herself-yes, Curtis is a she-who I had the pleasure of working with during the height of the dot-com boom (she was writing for the breathless way-new-business mag Fast Company, while I was at the too-smart-for-its-own-good online journal Feed Magazine). Those novels feature a certain kind of narrator: She’s funny and wry, if usually only in voice-over mode she’s self-aware and shy she’s smart and observant. This is not a bad thing, at least, not entirely so. Not because she so resembles Laura Bush but because she sounds like a female character in Curtis Sittenfeld’s other books: the phenomenally successful debut, Prep (2005), or the more mature second novel, The Man of My Dreams (2006). Her voice will be familiar to some readers. Our heroine’s name is actually Alice Blackwell.

American wife curtis