Real life is mostly dull. But occasionally reality is so outrageous and unexpected, it wouldn't ring true were it written as fiction.
Nicolle Wallace, former White House staffer and first-time novelist, knows what this is like. Her first novel, Eighteen Acres, about a female-dominated White House, is a book she describes as "pure fiction set in a very real place about people with jobs I know a whole lot about." Narrated by three powerful females at the top of their game - the U.S. president, her chief of staff and a network anchor - the book was inspired by the emotional journey Wallace herself took in politics throughout her 20s and 30s, which by her own admission "ran the gamut from triumph to humiliation."
And what a journey is was. Wallace, an unflappable blonde who spoke to me over the phone from her New York home in sentences so smoothly intricate they might have been scripted by Aaron Sorkin, is a moderate Republican who gained a reputation for tough-minded diplomacy first as a special assistant to the president and later as director of communications under George W. Bush.
She served both terms under Bush-Cheney and was then hired to run the John McCain-Sarah Palin campaign in 2008. This is, of course, when reality really got stranger than fiction. As a former senior adviser and chief spokesperson for McCain, Wallace now holds the rather fascinating distinction of being Sarah Palin's second-least-favourite person after Levi Johnston.
It was Wallace whom Palin blamed in her memoir for charging her designer wardrobe to the campaign, and also for cajoling Palin into doing the disastrous Katie Couric interview. It was also Wallace, when the 2008 campaign was in its death throes and the rumoured infighting was at its most vicious, who coolly told CNN, "If people want to throw me under the bus, my personal belief is that the most honourable thing to do is to lie there."
Okay then! This is a woman who's seen some action.
But while her book contains glimpses of reality (there is a game-changing campaign fist bump, a bungled TV interview, and a "tacky and rude" female vice-presidential candidate "determined to calculate the least presidential approach to everything and pursue it with vigour"), the novel should not be mistaken for a vengeful satire or even a roman à clef.
"If I'd wanted to set the record straight that way, I would have written a memoir," Wallace quite reasonably points out.
Instead, the fictional world she constructs in Eighteen Acres (a reference to the tract of land that contains the White House) is an accessible and involving feminist utopia in which women hold the highest office in America without much discussion of gender issues. Every single one of the characters who pushes the action forward is female, yet this is offered without comment.
"I wanted to create a parallel universe and play with the idea of role reversal without sending any overt messages," says Wallace. "I think the glass ceiling our generation faces is every bit as oppressive as the one before us and that was very much on my mind."
For an author so steeped in politics, the book contains barely a reference to race, religion, health care, gay rights or any of the other hot-button social issues which have become the consuming obsessions of today's American right. This, she says, was not about shying away from controversy, but straight-up realism.
"The reality of working in the White House is that you don't sit around and have a lot of enlightened discussions about abortion and gay marriage," she says. "There's no time. You're dealing with the debates and the controversies as they come flying at you and there's a great flattening that happens at this level. You can't deal with one issue over another, because you have to deal with 800 things a day. That's the unfortunate reality of a modern-day presidency."
Speaking of reality, while the book is rather sweeping and epic in its plot (lots of illicit sex, lots of war), it also offers an unvarnished portrait of the day-to-day reality of workaholic female politicos who toil 16-hour days, seven days a week, fuelled by a steady diet of Aleve and Diet Coke. Her central character, a disgruntled yet duty-bound chief of staff, mentally composes her resignation letter in order to cope with the daily stress.
"It's a universal truth that the job is more brutal than it is magisterial," Wallace says. "But it's tricky to talk about that when you're in it, because at the same time, you're aware of being part of such a small group of lucky, privileged people," she says.
Wallace's life now, post-politics, she describes as "glorious." She has a contract to write a sequel to Eighteen Acres and has already completed a first draft. "After the Palin experience, I needed to orient myself around a single process. I needed to pay tribute to this world without being preachy about it," she explains. "I've experienced the glory of politics, but this book is about getting down on my belly and spending time in the grit."