NICOLLE WLACE, the tough, savvy and hard-charging conservative political operator, was laughing and explaining why Melanie Kingston, the tough, savvy and hard-charging conservative political operator who just so happens to be a protagonist in Mrs. Wallace’s first novel, “Eighteen Acres,” isn’t like her at all.
“I’m flattered frankly when people see me in her,” Mrs. Wallace said, referring to her fictional character — the first female chief of staff to the first female president, Charlotte Kramer. “She is so devoted to the job that there’s nothing else in her life. People who know me know I was very devoted, very loyal, but was always like, ‘Can I go now?’ ”
She laughed and, miming a White House staffer ready to flee for the day, flopped across the table at Bistro Lepic, a cozy French haunt in upper Georgetown that she used to frequent before moving to New York four years ago. And Mrs. Wallace, whose gray-blue eyes and dark blond bob give her the look of the Northern California girl that she is, should know. She used to be that West Wing staffer.
She worked as President
George W. Bush’s communications director before signing on with Senator
John McCain’s presidential bid in 2008. The McCain-Palin campaign was troubled from the outset, and Mrs.
Wallace emerged as a scapegoat, bearing the blame for everything from the spending spree that a McCain aide later called “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus” to Gov.
Sarah Palin’s disastrous interview with
Katie Couric.
“It was just so demoralizing and humiliating,” Mrs. Wallace said. “I was so wounded by the accusations about going shopping. I was like, ‘My God, I was the White House communications director for six years, I wrote speeches about wars, and people think I went to Neiman Marcus and bought her skirts.’ How did that happen?”
When Mrs. Palin’s book, “Going Rogue,” came out the next year, Mrs. Wallace was a prime target.
“It was just embarrassing and hurtful and sad,” said Mrs. Wallace, who hasn’t read the book. “I was surprised by how delusional her account was, but I think she was so desperate to offer some explanation to her devoted followers.”
But now, Mrs. Wallace is back in the political fray on her own terms, with a debut novel named after the 18 acres on which the White House sits.
“I was a campaign press secretary,” she said. “It is still so surreal to me that there is a book in your purse with my name on it.”
The book is an engaging, easy read, told from the alternating points of view of three female characters — a president, a chief of staff and an up-and-coming television anchor. The plot turns on an explosive affair (First Husband, anyone?) and a disaster in the Middle East, neither of which seems implausible.
Mrs. Wallace, who was inspired to write a book after reading “The Devil Wears Prada” during Mr. Bush’s first term, said that she wanted to capture the current moment in Washington.
“It feels new, like it’s different from the way it was 10 years ago, but it feels fleeting, too, like it’s going to be different in another 10 years,” she said. “I don’t know that the press will always be so interconnected and incestuously connected to the person they cover.”
But she didn’t want to write a roman à clef with easily recognizable characters.
“
Mike McCurry told me, ‘Don’t keep a diary,’ so I never wrote anything down,” she said. “We were freaked out. You never wanted to be the one loser who’d been keeping a diary of everything everyone said for eight years.”
Which is not to say she wanted for material. The McCain campaign was turbulent, and to those working for him, it often seemed as if anything that could go wrong did go wrong. Take, for instance, the Couric interview and what should have been a softball question about what newspapers Mrs. Palin read.
“I mean in hindsight, she never should have done any interviews,” Mrs. Wallace said. She recounted this in an upbeat, almost amused way, with the tone of someone who has struggled but moved on. She laughed, as if she still couldn’t quite believe how it all unfolded, and added: “I wish she’d just Tweeted. She should have been our Twitterer. But at the time, I grossly overestimated her capacity to answer questions about world affairs, about how her personal points of view were shaped.”
On Election Day, Mrs. Wallace didn’t even vote for the McCain-Palin ticket.
“I didn’t, I didn’t,” she said slowly. She never received her absentee ballot — “and I was fine with that,” she admitted.
Still, Mrs. Wallace said she now wears the entire experience “as a badge of honor.”
With the benefit of hindsight and as someone who now sits alone in front of a computer, I thank God every day that after my very orderly and pleasant Bush experience, I experienced this chaotic, dysfunction of the McCain-Palin world,” she said. “I’m a better writer because of it, and I think I’m a better person because of it.”
Ms. Wallace drew on Hillary Rodham Clinton’s character traits.
Getting “Eighteen Acres” published was hardly a foregone conclusion. All she really had was “a messy Word document,” until Sloan Harris, a literary agent at International Creative Management, called her after reading a Page Six item that said she was working on a novel. He asked her to send him what she had, so she organized it into six chapters and sent them off. He asked for more. Mrs. Wallace, a quintessential good student, met each of Mr. Harris’s deadlines, sending off three to six chapters at a time until she had an actual book. “Eighteen Acres” went to Atria publishing for a six-figure sum, and she already has a deal for the sequel.
And though Mrs. Wallace resisted caricaturing any of her colleagues in Washington, the politerati will certainly experience flashes of recognition. (“If I was a guessing man, I could probably get pretty close to some people,” said John Weaver, a political consultant who was one of Mrs. Wallace’s early readers). Like that affair between a journalist and a White House insider?
“The McCain campaign was definitely more sexually charged than the Bush years,” Mrs. Wallace laughed.
For her female president character, whose husband has an affair, Mrs. Wallace turned to
Hillary Rodham Clinton for inspiration: She “had the strength and presence of mind to just soldier through” her husband’s infidelity, Mrs. Wallace said. “I thought it was uniquely feminine to have the strength to endure those indignities in the public eye.”
And as for Melanie, the chief of staff who seems to most closely resemble Mrs. Wallace herself: She is reminiscent of the women Mrs. Wallace worked with, the “uncelebrated warriors, women who are doing great work and really the only thing standing between their bosses imploding is them, laying their body on the tracks every day.”
“It’s like, I have the greatest job in the world, but I’m exhausted, my eyes burn, I haven’t been to the gym in two months, my family hates me, and my friends don’t even have my cellphone number,” Mrs. Wallace said. “You’re relinquishing your entire life for the job, and that’s something I meant to capture in Melanie.”
Life for Mrs. Wallace is simpler these days. She gets up, scans the news, and heads to Central Park with her dog, Lily. She hits the gym, and then spends the rest of the day writing. She still makes appearances on the news programs — “Morning Joe,” “Good Morning America,” a little bit of CNN,
Sean Hannity’s show on Fox every Wednesday night — but without the pressure of “being on message.”
On her way down to Washington, her friend Dana Bash, the CNN correspondent, sent a message to her BlackBerry asking if she would be taking the train or flying down.
“I said I’m on the train, with all the bright-eyed, happy people who love their jobs,” Mrs. Wallace recalled. “The shuttle’s for all the grizzled people like us who did it for too long.”
Mrs. Wallace, eyeing a young, Washington type, eager and smiling, then added: “Washington can be like that when you’re young, when you get here and you’re so happy. I love getting to revisit my Washington time with the books.”
