Keeping Bill and Hillary on the Same Page
By STRAWBERRY SAROYAN
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HISTORY 102 Waiting to hear Bill Clinton in Chicago. He is is said to have received a $10 million advance.
N Tuesday, former President Bill Clinton's 957-page memoir, "My Life," bulls its way into bookstores with advance orders for two million copies. Comparisons are inevitably being made with another memoir, his wife's. Last year, Hillary Rodham Clinton's "Living History" became the best-selling political memoir in United States history (1.7 million copies sold). Senator Clinton was reportedly paid an $8 million advance; Mr. Clinton received a reported $10 million.
Competing books are always tricky, and the lives of writing couples trickier than most. With the Clintons in mind, four literary couples offer their views on how to ease the tension when two authors live in one house. How should the Clintons cope with jealousies over who is selling more books and who gets the better reviews? How to survive the tug of war over "material" both have experienced. And simply, who gets to work and who has to make the next run to Starbucks?
Michael Chabon
And Ayelet Waldman
Mr. Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his novel, "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." Ms. Waldman's novel "Murder Plays House" is being published in July.
AYELET WALDMAN I have this joke I tell in my appearances when I first mention Michael. I say, "Oh, poor thing, struggling along in my shadow."
Competition is not our issue. Mostly our issue is that we have too many children! No, our main issue is that he is an optimist and I'm a pessimist. He's convinced everything's going to turn out fabulously. I always think it's going to turn out horribly. One of us is always surprised.
MICHAEL CHABON Neither one of us would dream of saying, "Please don't put that in there, you're embarrassing me." My whole rap has always been — with regard to my parents particularly, who haven't liked being written about — that it's too bad you had a writer for a child. In all fairness, I can only apply the same standard to myself. It serves me right, doesn't it?
We work in the same room. I sit at the desk, and she lies on the couch and works on the laptop. I ask her from time to time if I can't think of a word or a person. If you're bothering the other person, they say, I can't talk right now. But mostly we're in there, and it's just click, click, click.
Chip Kidd![](https://img1.daumcdn.net/relay/cafe/original/?fname=http%3A%2F%2Fgraphics7.nytimes.com%2Fimages%2F2004%2F06%2F20%2Ffashion%2F20clin.2.jpg)
Librado Romero/The New York Times
HISTORY 101 Hillary Rodham Clinton signing her book, "Living History" last year. She is said to have been paid an $8 million advance.