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March 2001
The Business
First ladies' memoirs throughout history.
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By Kaja Perina
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Last year, Hillary Rodham Clinton scored $8 million for her memoir, but she's not the only president's wife to pen her story. Louisa Catherine (Mrs. John Quincy) Adams titled her personal papers from the 1820s "Adventures of a Nobody," but they were never intended for publication. Other first ladies have been more public; below are some volumes from this long tradition.
| FIRST LADY |
TITLE |
NOTES |
| Julia Dent Grant |
Personal Memoirs, published in 1975 |
Mrs. Grant shopped her book at the turn of the 20th century, but she was asking for $100,000, a sum deemed too high. The book was finally published in 1975. |
| Helen Herron Taft |
Recollections of Full Years, 1914 |
Mrs. Taft's autobiography, the first to be published during a first lady's lifetime, was largely apolitical, but she did lightly criticize her husband's predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. |
| Edith Bolling Wilson |
My Memoir, 1938 |
Mrs. Wilson earned $40,000 for serialized installments in The Saturday Evening Post. |
| Eleanor Roosevelt |
This I Remember, 1938 |
She didn't discuss FDR's infidelity or illness, and Mrs. Roosevelt received no advance. She did earn a 15 percent royalty, though, and sold serialization rights to McCall's for $150,000. |
| Lady Bird Johnson |
A White House Diary, 1970 |
Mrs. Johnson treated her White House years in detail. She received an undisclosed advance for the book, which was based on daily tape-recorded notes. |
| Betty Ford |
The Times of My Life, 1978 |
Mrs. Ford detailed her battle with breast cancer and her treatment for alcoholism and drug addiction. She and President Ford, who published his own memoir the following year, were jointly paid $1 million. |
| Rosalynn Carter |
First Lady from Plains, 1984 |
Mrs. Carter earned an advance of less than $500,000, but she did go on to write a number of best-sellers about spirituality and mental health. |
| Nancy Reagan |
My Turn, 1989 |
Mrs. Reagan earned $2 million for perhaps the most politically revelatory (albeit inadvertently) memoir, as America learned that an astrologer had affected some of President Reagan's decision-making. |
| Barbara Bush |
A Memoir, 1994 |
Mrs. Bush also received $2 million for her book, which, although written in the form of diary entries, didn't shed much light on her notoriously guarded opinions. |
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