In her eight years at the White House, former first lady Laura Bush had a Mona Lisa quality to her. That smile — was it one of peace, one of joy, or was it a mask? Perhaps all three. In her new memoir, Spoken from the Heart, Laura Bush writes about her life, from her early years — her childhood in Midland, Texas, and the night she was at the wheel when a car accident left a classmate dead — to her experiences in the White House during her husband's two terms.
Bush begins the book with an early memory that reflects part of "a pervasive loss for my family." When she was 2 years old, her mother, Jenna Welch, gave birth to a baby boy who did not survive long enough to leave the Western Clinic in the family's hometown, deep in west Texas. He was not the only baby lost to the Welch family.
"My mother had three other pregnancies," Bush tells NPR's Michele Norris, "and I have this very vague memory of looking at a nursery window in a hospital — or in Western Clinic in Midland. I don't remember looking at a baby. I just knew my little brother was there. And he did live for several days. Today, with the way medicine is, of course he would have lived; he was not that premature. But then, in 1948, he just lived for a few days."
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