Spoken From the Heart by Laura Bush

(Scribner, 456 pages, $30)

When Laura Bush met her future husband, she was “the old maid” of Midland, Texas, a pretty but reserved 30-year-old librarian, said Clare McHugh in The Wall Street Journal. George W. Bush was the town’s “most eligible bachelor,” soon to mount his first congressional campaign. They were introduced at a picnic and formed an instant bond. “On that warm summer night,” Laura writes, “we were both hoping to find someone.” Three months later, she would be married, and on a path toward a very public life that would never really suit her. Writing about that life in her new memoir, the former First Lady shuts down. But the first half of the book is an artful, heartbreaking coming-of-age story.

The book “passes the first-sentence test beautifully,” said Ann Gerhart in The Washington Post. It is a memory from age 2: “What I remember is the glass,” Mrs. Bush writes. She is describing peering through a hospital window at her newborn brother, who died within days. Her parents’ loss ensured that Laura would be “shaped by the enforced solitude of being an only child,” said Ruth Marcus, also in the Post. The author and her co-writer are “good, very good, at evoking Texas in the ’50s and ’60s.” We see how the culture and even the landscape promoted quiet stoicism in the face of hardships. That closed-off habit of mind served 17-year-old Laura poorly, though, in the emotional aftermath of a tragic night when she missed a stop sign while driving and killed one of her close friends.

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Profound feelings of guilt still burdened Laura when she first met W, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. The brash young Bush seemed likely to help her shake off her sense of isolation and sorrow. Yet, even as Spoken From the Heart becomes a “thoroughly conventional” account of life as a politician’s wife, we gradually come to realize that she never changed. Her “existential” loneliness is one of the “leitmotifs” that run to the final page. The other, touchingly, “is the sense of love, safety, and groundedness that Mrs. Bush found in her marriage and family.”