Laura Bush on Gay Rights and a Tragic Car Crash

Scribner

Spoken from the Heart, Laura Bush's memoir, will be released next week, and excerpts from the book are starting to appear. Atlantic politics editor Marc Ambinder highlights two passages from the book that were leaked by Politico this morning: one about the former First Lady's position on gay marriage in the 2004 election, and one about an incident where the Bushes may have been poisoned on a trip to Germany.

A New York Times article also includes several excerpts from the book that discuss the 1963 car crash where Bush ran a stop sign and killed her high school classmate, Mike Douglas. The most poignant paragraph from the Times article is here:

I lost my faith that November, lost it for many, many years," she says. "It was the first time that I had prayed to God for something, begged him for something, not the simple childhood wishing on a star but humbly begging for another human life. And it was as if no one heard. My begging, to my seventeen-year-old mind, had made no difference. The only answer was the sound of Mrs. Douglas's sobs on the other side of that thin emergency room curtain.

As the Times article reports, Bush had previously shied away from discussing the accident, and her memoir marks the first time she talks about it at length publicly.

Spoken from the Heart, published by Scribner, will come out on May 4.