The Times snagged a copy of Laura Bush's memoir Spoken from the Heart a week before its release, and they've got the goods: Possible presidential poisoning! Peeved political potshots! And details on her fatal, "mysterious" high-school car accident.

Former First Lady Laura Bush, who is known for being the literate member of her family, has a memoir called Spoken from the Heart coming out next week. But the New York Times' Anahad O'Connor got his grubby little grey-lady hands on a copy "at a bookstore" right now and spilled the beans. And while it's no Overton Window, it has its fair share of thrills! Speak to us from the heart, Anahad: What's in the book?

Intrigue! In the sexy thriller part of Spoken from the Heart, the Bushes and their staff are poisoned, which she knows happened because "They all became mysteriously sick, and the president was bedridden for part of the trip," and also, "several high-profile poisonings" happened, in the past. Hmmm.

Romance! Laura loves her husband, and will defend all his decisions, like the time he "responded" to Hurricane Katrina by flying over the resulting devastation, in his plane: "'He did not want one single life to be lost because someone was catering to the logistical requirements of a president,' she says about the Katrina fly-over." Hmmm.

Sparring! Harry Reid called George a "loser" and a "liar," which is basically the biggest curse a Mormon can say. Laura's response:

"The comments were uncalled for and graceless," she writes. "While a president's political opponents, as well as his supporters, are entitled to make what they see as legitimate criticisms, and while our national debates should be spirited, these particular worlds revealed the petty and parochial nature of some who serve in Congress."

Which is basically the Methodist Librarian version of "FUCK YOU." Sick burn, Laura!

Tragedy! The book apparently delves deeply into the story of the high-school car accident that killed a friend, Mike Douglas, while she was behind a wheel—a moment from her life that she has kept intensely private. It sounds like an awful experience to go through:

"In those awful seconds, the car door must have been flung open by the impact and my body rose in the air until gravity took over and I was pulled, hard and fast, back to earth," she says. "The whole time," she adds later, "I was praying that the person in the other car was alive. In my mind, I was calling ‘Please, God. Please, God. Please, God,' over and over and over again."...

Ms. Bush reveals that she was wracked by guilt for years after the crash, especially after not attending the funeral and for not reaching out to the parents of the dead teenager. Her parents did not want her to show up at the funeral, she states, and she ended up sleeping through it.

"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."

[NYT]