Ellen Emerson White on the First Woman President, Real and Imagined

As Vice President Kamala Harris’s historic campaign for the presidency enters its final weeks, writer Ellen Emerson White joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss her prescient 1984 novel The President’s Daughter, which imagines the first woman president’s campaign and early days in the White House from the point of view of her teenage daughter. White reminisces about beginning the YA book when she was still a teenager herself and notes the uncanny similarities between a fictional presidential debate that appears in the book and the recent Trump-Harris showdown. White reflects on the qualities her character Katharine Powers shares with Kamala White—notably,  a “likable, elegant swagger”—as well as how Powers’s cool bearing contrasts with Harris’s reputation for warmth. She talks about hitting pause on her current writing project following Harris’s entrance into the race, and reads from The President’s Daughter.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Meg’s mother is following a two-term Republican president who’s stepping down and who anoints Griffin as his successor. So she’s not running against an incumbent, she’s not a vice president, and she is the first woman candidate, and Kamala Harris isn’t. And of course, the history from which you were writing was different. You were writing in the wake of Carter, in the wake of Reagan. 

Ellen Emerson White: Yeah, Reagan was in office.

VVG: So you’ve been telling us about how you were 19 or 20 when you were working on this book. You sold your first two books when you were early in your college career at Tufts. To pivot a little to your writing process, can you tell us how you started writing this book?

EEW: You know it was a long time ago. I liked politics. Freshman year, I wrote two books, one of which was —

Whitney Terrell: Holy cow! Were you a writing major? What was your major? 

EEW: No, I wasn’t comfortable in the English Department, and I was going to be political science. But —

WT: I mean, my son’s 19. He’s in his second year of college. I am having a hard time imagining him… I have a hard enough time writing books myself, and I’m 56 so I don’t understand how a 19-year-old gets this done.

EEW: I had been writing all during high school, all of which was thrown away when I was living in Boston. It is somewhere in a landfill. After I was in my 20s, I thought, “I don’t want anyone to see all these terrible books I wrote when I was in high school.”  I just always wrote a lot, but nobody knew. I just never slept because I was on all the sports teams. I played the saxophone. I was on the newspaper, class council, student council, state student council, model legislature, all that. And I did assume I was going to Washington. I thought I would be an attorney, or I thought I would go into politics. 

So I wrote this little mystery, and then I wrote a romance—one of the worst books I’ve ever written, but, you know, whatever—and one of my friends sophomore year said, “Why do you write these books and put them in a drawer?” I said, “It’s a hobby. I’m going to the movies. I’ll talk to you when I get back.” Because I would go to five or six movies a week during my entire college career, and then come back, eat and drink coffee, hang out, go to whatever party we were having, and then I would write between around 11 and four in the morning.  

WT: I was never sober enough between 11 and four in the morning to write anything.

EEW: I was probably a little lit when I sat down, and my roommate sophomore year was pre-med, and she went to the Gott Room, which was the part of the library that was open till three in the morning every night. She would come back at three in the morning and take a shower and get ready for bed, and then I would stop writing so we could turn the light off at the same time. And then I would have to get up at like… Because my father taught at the University of Rhode Island and ended up putting four kids through school, and we didn’t have a lot of money, I worked three jobs the whole time I was in college, also. I worked in the dining hall, I typed people’s papers, and I worked in the coffee shop in our version of the student union. 

So I was always running around to work and whatever, and I would just write during that concentrated period at night. But sophomore year, one of my friends said, “Why don’t you send the book out?” I’m like, “I don’t know.” And so my mother got me Writer’s Market, which was how you—

VVG: I remember that. That giant book.

EEW: That’s how you had to do it back in the day. I wrote to five agents, never heard from a couple of them, got a rejection, and this is all the summer before my junior year, which was a hard summer for me, because to save my parents money, I said I would leave Tufts for a year and go to URI because I could go free as a faculty kid. So I was really grumpy about all my friends going off to Paris and London and wherever for the year, and I’m going to Rhode Island. But, yeah, you’re like, “Okay, okay, I’ll be a good sport.” 

So I got a rejection, didn’t hear from two, one of them asked me for money, which I figured, that’s got to be bad. Yeah and one agent wrote back and said—I sent one chapter—he wrote back and he said, “You know, it’s vaguely interesting, send me the book.” So I sent him the book and heard back from him. And he said, “Oh, I want to represent you. Can you come?” He lived in northwest Connecticut, in one of the fancy towns, and was a retired editor from somewhere… I forget.  He said, “Can you come do the paperwork?”  

I don’t have a car or anything, and so I had to ride with my parents in the station wagon down to this very exclusive neighborhood in Connecticut where people like David Letterman live. I said, “I am not driving up to this man’s house with you in the car. This isn’t happening.” So they had the Sunday Times, and I let them off in this neighborhood watch area, so the police got called on them and everything. Oops, my bad. And I drive up in the station wagon. Oh, but they have The Times. They can sit on a log, they can read the book reviews, read arts and leisure. “You’ll be fine. I’ll be right back.” 

So I get to the house. He’s a really nice man. His wife has a little snack for me. I sign all the paperwork. Actually, I didn’t sign it because he said… Because I looked really young, I was only 19, but I looked even younger… “Ellen, you can’t legally sign this without your parents. And so when you go meet up with them, have them look it over before you sign this paperwork, please.” And I said, “How do you know I’m here with my parents?” And he said, “Look at the car! That’s not your car. You were here with your parents.” 

So I signed the paperwork.  It’s my first day of class at URI. I’m really unhappy because I’m not at Tufts, and all my friends are doing fun things and whatever, but I’m being a good sport. I come home from my first day of classes, and my mother’s at the table and a couple of friends, and they’re like, how’s your first day? And I’m getting my Coca-Cola, or Tab in those days, and saying, “Oh, it was fine.” The phone rings.  So I go over and get the phone. It’s the agent, and this is three weeks after I signed for them, and he said, “Ellen, the oddest thing has happened today.” And I said, “Mhm?”  He said, “Well, I sent the book to Avon, which, you will note, begins with A. I wasn’t expecting to get any interest until we hit Simon & Schuster or Vanguard, or way down the alphabet. But the very strange thing is they want to buy it.’” And I’m like, “What?” And he said “‘Yeah, so we’ve just sold your first novel.’” And then I said “Okay,” and I hung up, and I said to my mother, “Oh, he sold the book.” And she starts crying at the table, and that’s how it happened.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle.

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Ellen Emerson White

“The President’s Daughter” series • A Season of Daring Greatly • Webster: Tale of an Outlaw • “The Echo Company” series

Others:

Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7 Episode 50: “Thomas Frank on How the Harris-Walz Ticket Can Win Red State Voters” • The Apprentice