Archive for November 19th, 2008

So she may have lost the vice presidency, but she will likely win a big book deal coming out of this. According to this article from the Canberra Times, agents and imprints are lining up to make a bid for Gov. Sarah Palin’s memoirs. The current publishing guessing game? Whether the advance will top the $6 million Tina Fey landed for a book. There’s a chance it might not, which would be sad, but so it goes in the publishing world. We do know that conservative politico books sell pretty well.

That said, the literary types quoted in this piece talk about how her rough introduction to the national stage will be the biggest selling point of the book. I disagree. If Palin wants a future in politics, she can’t dwell on a grudge match with the national media and various sneering feminist types who greeted the idea of a first female conservative VP with outrage. Her memoirs should serve two more forward looking functions.

First, like Ronald Reagan after 1976, Palin is about to spend a few years in the political wilderness. She needs to build up her base, and make it extremely clear what she stands for (as Reagan did in radio shows, his writings and the like). She’s already talked a good game about being pro-entrepreneur, pro-free market, pro-Second Amendment and pro-life. All of these are solid philosophical ideas which she needs to defend at length. Why does she believe them? Why are they the right thing for America? She can really delve into political philosophy here, economics, plus personal storytelling — anecdotes of Alaska folks and the people in her life who believe these things (the Palins run a commercial fishing business… they know about the entrepreneurial spirit).

Second, I hesitate to talk about Dreams from my Father, but Barack Obama did do a good (if perhaps not 100% accurate) job of turning his early life into a narrative. The lost father is, of course, an archetypal hero’s journey, but Palin can definitely turn her childhood in this newest American state into a frontier story. She can talk of being lost a bit as a young person — literary readers love alienation, and I don’t know how else you define attending four colleges — and then about how she found herself being called to lead the people she grew up with. Throw in the gaudy world of pageants blended with the rough world of commercial fishing and snowmobiling races, the prestige of being a governor and the loneliness of knowing you are carrying an infant with special needs and not knowing who you can trust to tell… and you’ve got a good narrative.

Oh, and you need a good ghostwriter… (if anyone connected to the Palin camp is reading this, give me a call).