Fizzy chick lit invades the Oval Office
An oval office has no corners, logically, and so the title of Beck Dorey-Stein’s new memoir, “From the Corner of the Oval” ( Spiegel & Grau, 330 pp., ★★g☆) is a clever description of her time as a political nonfactor – a stenographer – blending into the woodwork of the Obama administration.
Housed in the vast confines of the EEOB, or Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a city-block-size civic cathedral next to the White House, DoreyStein was part of the team tasked with transcribing every public presidential utterance, speech or interview. Not an inconsequential job, but Wesleyan grad Dorey-Stein was overqualified.
The harder part was gaining security clearance. But Dorey-Stein’s brief tenure tutoring at Washington’s Sidwell Friends School, where the Obama daughters (and Vice President Joe Biden’s granddaughters) were enrolled, smoothed her way to a White House post. Before that, she had been kicking around D.C. in the manner of post-graduate aspirants to the good life.
Clearly, this is a chronicle of privilege – flights on Air Force One, accompanying POTUS and the press around the globe, chasing romance and status with other lucky twenty- and thirtysomethings.
Obama is a bit player. Dorey-Stein encounters him at a fitness-center treadmill, and he nods his encouragement amid some casual conversation.
But there’s no insight into politics or policy, nor any behind-the-scenes presidential tension. What’s at stake, mainly, is the author’s love life.
The book offers a steady stream of meet-cute moments, as Dorey-Stein encounters hunky staffers and Secret Service guys.
It shamelessly echoes its chick-lit model, “The Devil Wears Prada,” as Dorey-Stein’s cohort dish out side-eye and are duly cited for their expensive Tumi luggage and “steep Tory Burch high heels with the circle logo on the toe.”
The sense that this is mainly a 300page treatment for a Saoirse Ronan vehicle or a Netflix series is solidified by the implausible perfection of DoreyStein’s first D.C. boyfriend, who materi- alizes animatronically on page 14, “tall, with sandy brown hair … his bear paw of a hand... the sportsman’s scruff and moss-green eyes.” Their initial breakup is so maudlin, even by rom-com standards, that not even artistic license the size of the EEOB can sell it.
In fairness, Dorey-Stein warns us in a prefatory note that “I’ve used pseudonyms, composites and other forms of disguise. In some instances, I have rearranged and/or compressed events and time periods in service of the narrative.”
In other words, let’s not burden things with reality since, you know, you get the idea. Of course, we expect such truthiness from our biopics and docudramas, but in the context of something so recent and so concrete as the Obama administration, this feels like an abdication.
Yes, Dorey-Stein is a lively writer, and her tale makes for fizzy beach reading – evaporating, alas, like many a White House gig after election day.