Laura Bush discusses car crash in upcoming memoir

Image Credit: Duffy-Marie Arnoult/WireImageThe New York Times managed to get its hands on a copy of Laura Bush’s upcoming memoir, Spoken From the Heart, and has spilled a lot of its newsiest content. I’m guessing a certain bookstore employee somewhere is going to be receiving a midnight visit from the publishing equivalent of Dick Cheney with a baseball bat.

In the book, the Times reports, Bush goes into detail about the fatal car accident she caused as a teenager on a country road in Midland, Tex., in November 1963. The former First Lady had long been silent on the accident, which claimed the life of a high school classmate, Mike Douglas. But here she recounts the events of that night — she ran a red light while rushing with a girlfriend to a drive-in in her father’s Chevy Impala and crashed into Douglas’ car — and the guilt that haunted her for years afterward. “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,” she writes. She also uses the book to defend her husband against his political detractors, including Democratic congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, whose public comments about her husband (“loser” and “liar”) she calls “graceless.”

Mrs. Bush’s book, due in bookstores this Tuesday, precedes the former president’s own memoir, Decision Points, by six months. His book is set to his bookstores on Nov. 19.