Once again Sue Miller takes us deep into the private lives of women with this mesmerizing portrait of two marriages exposed in all their shame and imperfection, and in their obdurate, unyielding love. The author of the iconic The Good Mother and the best-selling While I Was Gone brings her marvelous gifts to a powerful story of two unconventional women who unexpectedly change each other’s lives.

Meri is newly married, pregnant, and standing on the cusp of her life as a wife and mother, recognizing with some terror the gap between reality and expectation. Delia Naughton—wife of the two-term liberal senator Tom Naughton—is Meri’s new neighbor in the adjacent New England town house. Delia’s husband’s chronic infidelity has been an open secret in Washington circles, but despite the complexity of their relationship, the bond between them remains strong. What keeps people together, even in the midst of profound betrayal? How can a journey imperiled by, and sometimes indistinguishable from, compromise and disappointment culminate in healing and grace? Delia and Meri find themselves leading strangely parallel lives, both reckoning with the contours and mysteries of marriage, one refined and abraded by years of complicated intimacy, the other barely begun.

Here are all the things for which Sue Miller has always been beloved—the complexity of experience precisely rendered, the richness of character and emotion, the superb economy of style—fused with an utterly engrossing story that has a great deal to say to women, and men, of all ages.

Praise for Sue Miller's The Senator's Wife

“Pure Miller . . . tasteful, elegant, sensuous . . . insightful, complex . . . The Senator’s Wife is Miller’s latest extended contemplation of marriage, and a master class in the refinement of craft.” —The Boston Globe

“Complex and beautifully drawn . . . with her keen eye and precise prose, Ms. Miller expertly conveys the passage of time and the evolution of emotions, giving readers the sense of lives fully lived.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Miller plays her hand in a masterly fashion.” —The New York Times Book Review

“I closed The Senator’s Wife and instantly wished there was someone around with whom to discuss the Jodi Picoult like ending.” —USA Today


Lost in the Forest

“But more important and distinctive is the power of a style that never announces itself as ‘style’ and that is consonant with a nonjudgmental poise of presentation. T. S. Eliot once wondered whether Shakespeare really ‘thought’ anything at all: ‘He was occupied with turning human actions into poetry,’ Eliot decided. Something similar might be said about Miller’s impartiality, her refusal to assign blame or ‘explain’ why things happen as they happened. Her sense of life one calls it that, inadequately is such that we are content to discover with her the powerful connections among the characters and events she imagines.” —The Boston Globe

“[K]een psychological insight, her radar for emotional nuance, her visceral understanding of familial dynamics. . . . Ms. Miller’s innate sympathy for her characters and her shrewd understanding of the mathematics of family life go a long way.” —The New York Times

“Miller has always been adept at rendering the complexities of family life, the way even well-intentioned, decent people can't walk across a room without wounding at least one person they love.” —The New York Times Book Review

“It has been said that every good novelist is also a sociologist. Well, if sociologists can be said to shed light on how people must lead their lives at a given time and place in a society, then that statement certainly applies to Sue Miller, who has been providing just that kind of illumination, book to book, since she began her career more than 25 years ago with The Good Mother.” —The Washington Post Book World

“[Miller] succeeds brilliantly. . . . Miller’s characters have room to breathe, to be confused and petty and clear-headed and generous, to get swept up by passion, to fall in love and have children and watch as those children grow away from them, to fall in and out of love with their spouses, to stay married or get divorced, to have sex and drink wine and dance. Miller is adept at creating believable characters of all ages, from toddlers to great-grandparents, but her specialty is the middle-aged woman caught between her responsibilities and her desires. . . . Sue Miller has proven herself a master of contemporary life.” —Newsday

“Over the span of her many novels, Sue Miller has used simple, straightforward prose to plumb the irregular heart that beats deep within the relationships of men and women. Whether these relationships are made up of romantic attachments or the bonds that connect parents and children, Miller knows exactly how to corral their turbulent emotions and complex revelations into a fluid, compelling story of everyday life.” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Miller is a master of the domestic drama.” —The Sunday Oregonian


While I Was Gone

“Sue Miller is an Anne Tyler with edge, an Amy Tan without the sentimentality. Like Mary Gordon, she holds moral dilemmas up to the clarifying light of messy everyday reality. And like some Gail Sheehy of fiction, she tracks with authority all our difficult passages from childhood through old age. . . . Miller’s prose is seamlessly composed, tailored for introspection and quiet revelation rather than show.” —Newsday

“Miller’s greatest asset: her ability to construct a grainy, close-focus portrait of her characters, both in relation to each other and in their interior lives.” —The Boston Globe

“Miller transforms the stuff of troubled domesticity into serious entertainment for everyone.” —The Chicago Tribune


The World Below

“[W]hat Miller achieves consistently is a certain luminous portrait of the life lived day to day: the choices made, the regrets suffered, the cracks in the foundation we choose to confront or avoid.” —The Boston Globe

“Sue Miller’s work belongs at the top of the novel of domestic realism, of the relations between men and women, of hungry generations treading one another down but taking some pleasure in the interplay. Her achievement is to have portrayed this in language that for all its incidental poetry makes us also feel that the poetry isn't what matters, that her stories are told by employing, as Wordsworth put it, ‘Words / Which speak of nothing more than what we are.’” —The New York Times Book Review

“Miller herself is a historian of the human condition, writ small.” —Newsday

“Miller, a veteran documentarian of contemporary domestic life in such engrossing works as The Good Mother and While I Was Gone, provides convincing, intimate glimpses into her characters’ hearts.” —Washington Post

“[Miller] has a keen eye for nature and ambiance. . . . Miller excels in chronicling nuances of domestic affections, half-truths, self-conscious creation of one’s self and the bittersweet fiction of memory.” —Chicago Tribune

“Reading a Sue Miller novel is like listening to your best friend tell a story. Over the years, she has cultivated a certain artlessness and a way with domestic details that make you feel as though you’re at a kitchen table, watching your friend while she embroiders her tale and chops onions for supper. The strength of her work is its detailed realism. There are food and weather both lovingly described, dirty diapers in a toilet bowl, a cross-eyed fox stole. And the characters are as solidly a part of the earth as their surroundings.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Miller’s strength has always been her incisive grasp of family dynamics, the moments that pass but somehow sparkle in memory like glass shards, pointed, pointing, not quite fitting with what we think we know, or quietly illuminating something we'd rather not speak of.” —Detroit Free Press

Sue Miller is the best-selling author of the novels Lost in the Forest, The World Below, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, For Love, Family Pictures, and The Good Mother; the story collection Inventing the Abbotts; and the memoir The Story of My Father. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Q: THE SENATOR’S WIFE tells the story of two unconventional women whose lives become intertwined when the younger woman, Meri, moves with her husband to the townhouse adjacent to the one owned by the wife of a New England senator. Was there one event in particular that sparked the idea for THE SENATOR’S WIFE?
A: As is usually the case with me -- and I suspect with most writers -- it isn't one event which gets a book going, but a concatenation of things, a "perfect storm", as it were. In this case, I started with an interest in the idea of someone taking in an estranged spouse who was ill, as I'd heard of its happening with several acquaintances. I was also interested in an exploration of sexual jealousy, prompted in part by experience, and in part by the kind of prurient fascination I think we have all shared with the Bill-Hillary-Monica situation; but also with earlier political scandals, like Ted Kennedy and the Chappaquidick disaster, after which Joan Kennedy, to general amazement, campaigned with him; or Gary Hart's misadventure, which didn't end his marriage. The terms of those marriages, the adjustments, the pain implicit in them fascinated me. I'd also just read a wonderful book of poetry about marriage and jealousy by Ann Carson, called THE BEAUTY OF THE HUSBAND, and this was wildly in my thoughts.

In pondering how to work with this fictionally, I realized I wanted a way of looking at it from the outside as well as from within -- another point of view besides Delia's. I invented a neighbor, Meri, as fascinated as I was by it all. But in addition, as I discovered while creating her and her life, she offered what I thought of as an interesting contrast -- a very different kind of marriage from Delia's, a different set of terms governing it.

Q: The viewpoint in THE SENATOR’S WIFE flips between Delia and Meri, and the timeline bounces around a bit. How did you handle this as a writer?
A: Like the timeline, I bounced around a bit. I wrote some of it in the order in which you read it, but there were parts that I added after the fact, and there was a good deal of rearranging of the elements as I worked, and then as I revised too. I was aware of not wanting the predictability of one chapter for Delia, then one chapter for Meri. I wanted to work more organically, as I thought of it -- with the book's own emotional logic dictating the order of things.

Q: You never name the New England state where Delia and Meri live, but the town has a very vivid sense of place. What is your relationship with New England and why did you choose not to name the state?
A: I thought if I named the state, it would interfere with the suspension of disbelief for readers -- that people would remember who had actually been the senator from that state during the years Tom was supposed to be serving, and this would make entering the book on its own terms perhaps a little more difficult.

I've lived in New England for almost fifty years now, though I grew up in Chicago. But my parents were both from New England families, and because my father was an academic, he had long summers off. We always came east for those months -- months in which New England, particularly to the child that I was, is paradisiacal. I especially love small towns in New England, though I'm not sure I'd be able to live in one full time. I'm a pretty committed urban creature.

Q: You present a very brave and honest portrait of motherhood through Meri. Being a mother, was this hard for you to write?
A: Being a mother has never made anything hard for me to write because I've never written anything directly autobiographical about that experience, and I don't intend to. But it has offered me insight into feelings and events that I've been thrilled, always, to make use of fictionally.

Q: Both Delia and Meri have much internal dialogue—often negative—about their own bodies. Why did you choose to include those thoughts?
A: Delia's negative thoughts have primarily to do with getting old, and it seemed important to me that the reader feel her age as she feels it -- that the reader be intensely aware of her as a person who is elderly.Meri, in fact, loves her body -- or has loved it. It's because her body is changing with pregnancy that she has negative thoughts about it. I don't think this is inevitable for pregnant women -- some feel more beautiful, sexier -- but it seemed to me it might be true for Meri, whose pregnancy is not entirely welcome, and who has been so pleased with her strength, her physicality.

Q: THE SENATOR’S WIFE explores many types of relationships: friendship, parenthood, and marriage. Which relationship do you see as the most tenuous?
A: I suspect the degree of tenuousness of all of these kinds of relationships depends almost entirely on who is in them, but I do think for most people being a parent is the least questionable of the three -- there's a kind of absolute commitment required in that situation that makes the connection very powerful. Although then there are the teenage years ...

Q: How do you research the specifics of what you write about? For instance, how did you know how a political campaign is run?
A: I read, primarily. For THE SENATOR'S WIFE, I read a couple of books about and by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, because both his age and his politics seemed to me close to what I imagined for Tom. And then by chance I have a wonderful record of multiple life stories in my father's college alumni records -- a history of the doings of all the members of his class as they report it, collected every five years. I have about seven of these tomes, the first written at graduation, the last fifty years later. For THE SENATOR'S WIFE, I read the stories in them of the lives of several of his classmates who were involved in politics; I read accounts of what they did in the war, what they had to say about their marriages, about their children, about the way their lives turned and changed. In addition I read literature about strokes and their sequellae. I read WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU'RE EXPECTING in order to understand Meri's experience of pregnancy.

But I also purchased a home pregnancy testing kit, which seemed to unnerve the drugstore checkout clerk. And later used it. I went to Emily Dickinson's home for the experience of being led through an historic residence by a docent. I went to a conference on aphasia in Boston. I watched film interviews with a number of people who suffer in quite different ways with the disease. I walked around the likely streets in Paris and chose a place for Delia to live. And I used experiences from my own life. Aprison writing class I taught. Labor. Being prepped for radio interviews, and then being on the air. House hunting. Shopping at a farmers' market in New England in the fall. Everything else.

Q: Some of the novel is told through the epistolary form. Do you have a special interest in the art of letter writing?
A: I think I have the interest in letter writing that a lot of people my age do. It was utterly central to my life and my family's life as I grew up and became a young woman; and it is of diminishing importance now, which seems to me a great loss. I feel as though I've come to an understanding of my family's life in part through its epistolary history -- not just from what the letters say, but from thinking about what seems true in the letters, what seems false, and why that might have been. And then there are the horrible letters home I wrote, which my mother saved, and which forced me to consider myself at various ages -- again, what was true, what was false, and why I variously told the truth or distorted it.