By Helen Epstein

The rewards are slight in new politically minded books by a pair of shrewd and perceptive women.

True Gretch: What I’ve Learned About Life, Leadership, and Everything in Between by Gretchen Whitmer. Simon & Schuster 2024, 156 pp.

An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin. Simon & Schuster, 480 pp.

I went into the political woods with two smart and savvy women: multiple award-winning local author, historian, and television commentator Doris Kearns Goodwin and current Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. I came out feeling like Goldilocks, disappointed by the gruel. True Gretch is a hybrid of campaign memoir and self-help book; ghost-written by Lisa Dickey, it is short, slick, and told in the sassy voice of the person Trump called “the woman in Michigan.” As literary fare, it was way too thin. An Unfinished Love Story, an ambitious hybrid of memoir, biography, and political history of the 1960s in the United States, on the other hand, was way too thick and not entirely cooked through. Reading both, I found myself distracted by thoughts of a dying publishing industry.

True Gretch has no literary pretensions. It’s marketed toward a young and perhaps reluctant reader, with its colloquial title superimposed on a poster-like image of the photogenic governor. The text features short sentences and many anecdotes printed in the oversize type used in Y/A books, with lots of photos, a couple of recipes, a playlist of Whitmer’s favorite songs, and a table of contents with such upbeat headings as “Don’t Let the Bullies Get you Down” and  “Surround Yourself with Great People — And Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help.” It begins with a prologue featuring Whitmer’s grandmother’s three pieces of advice: “Work hard. Don’t get married until you’re at least twenty-eight. And never part your hair in the middle.” If I hadn’t committed to reviewing the book, I would have stopped reading right there. But I knew that the author was no dummy and I wanted to read her story, even if she chose to tell it in a deliberately dumbed-down way.

“The woman in Michigan” as a former President called her, is a white, middle-class late-bloomer. Born in Lansing, in 1971, she was an indifferent student and teenage party girl who graduated from Michigan State and the Detroit College of Law. She first ran for office at the age of 29, and served in the Michigan state legislature from 2000 until  2015. While Minority Leader in the Michigan Senate, she attracted national attention during an abortion bill debate by speaking in detail about being raped by a fellow student in college. She was elected governor of Michigan in 2018. Two years later, she gave the Democratic Party’s response to President Trump’s State of the Union address. Soon she had so alienated the right-wing of her state that she was targeted for kidnapping in a plot that was foiled by the FBI. She makes light of that story in True Gretch, and touches even more lightly on her personal life (two marriages, one divorce, two daughters). She highlights several political episodes, each ending with a suitable one-line moral. My favorite was the one that came out of her first gubernatorial campaign, when she drove 150,000 miles across Michigan, braving bad weather and potholes to chat with “ordinary people” and learn what she could do to “make their lives better.”

It was in a children’s hospital asking about health care that Whitmer first heard, “Fix the damn roads” from a mom whose son’s illness was less problematic than her difficulties traveling to the hospital. In a chapter called “Learn to Listen” Whitmer explains that “fixing the roads wasn’t about roads. It was about life.” She and her campaign manager made “Fix the damn roads” her campaign slogan.

At the risk of sounding like a snooty Easterner, I thought True Gretch read less like a book than the transcript of an appearance on a late-night talk show: entertaining, topical, and undemanding.

Moving from Gretch to An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s requires a mental reset. Doris Kearns Goodwin has taken on at least three major problems in this complicated mashup of a biography, memoir, and political history. The first was to complete a book that her beloved husband, Richard Goodwin, had asked her to co-write, based on three hundred boxes of documents and memorabilia he had accumulated over his lifetime as a speechwriter and advisor to the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson, and Eugene McCarthy.

Goodwin was over 80 when they began their work and 86 when he died of cancer. His widow was left with a half-finished manuscript and another problem: How do you profile — but not eulogize — a beloved partner of four decades whom you met at Harvard University when he was a revered, 40-year-old New Frontiersman coping with a problematic marriage and she, a single assistant professor of 29? Clue: she leaves out almost all of his intimate life. The third challenge, as I see it, was to write a fresh account of the much-documented times they lived through while drawing on her own and her husband’s previously published work as well as the documents in those 300 boxes.

The author of seven well-received nonfiction volumes (Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga; No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II; Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir; Every Four Years: Presidential Campaign Coverage from 1896 to 2000; Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln; The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism; Leadership in Turbulent Times), Doris Kearns Goodwin knew what she was getting into.

 The couple’s “exploration of the boxes” — not the most dramatic narrative line — is not strong enough to hold together this very unwieldy book. It contains a huge amount of partially digested materials: invaluable detailed memories from two intelligent and informed insiders witnessing the making of American history; moving nuggets of detailed description; overlong extracts of diaries and old letters and previously published material; and stilted reconstructed dialogue between the co-writers sifting through the boxes. This catch-all approach raises many questions — about both writers, about their relationships to one another, and to the powerful leaders they served — that it does not answer.

One example of a heart-stopping, precious nugget dates from July of 1960 and references Democratic Presidential nominee JFK picking his VP. Drawing on Goodwin’s materials, she describes what the President’s brother, Bobby, thought about the selection of Lyndon Johnson. “Robert Kennedy, Dick told me, was disconsolate about Johnson’s selection,” Doris Kearns Goodwin writes, “‘Don’t worry Bobby,’ Kennedy told his brother, a comment Bobby grimly confided to Dick years later, ’Nothing’s going to happen to me.’”

Kearns Goodwin also draws extensively on her own work, up-close and on the Texas ranch, with LBJ, who asked her to help him write his memoir when she was still in her 20s and had just earned her doctorate in government. It was an invaluable opportunity, a time during which she wrote her first book and received private lessons in political strategy. “A measure must be sent to the Hill at exactly the right moment,” Johnson told her, detailing how he persuaded Congress to vote for the Great Society, “and that moment depends on three things: first, on momentum; second, on the availability of sponsors in the right place at the right time; and third, on the opportunities for neutralizing the opposition.… Momentum is not a mysterious mistress, it is a controllable fact of political life that depends on nothing more exotic than preparation.”

But fascinating and impressive passages like these are relatively rare in An Unfinished Love Story. Mostly, it’s a slog, and during this political summer of 2024 I was left wondering: what is the definition of a book nowadays? Just another commodity? Do writers or readers care about the literary quality of the finished product? Are drafts a thing of the past? And is it no longer realistic for a reviewer to find one that’s “just right?”

Helen Epstein began writing for the Arts Fuse in 2010 and is now at work on a memoir about being a journalist.