In the pantheon of first lady memoirs, Melania Trump’s is something else

“The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt” was a feminist triumph that reinforced her legacy as both a quote machine and an accomplished political actor. Betty Ford’s “The Times of My Life” was a groundbreaking confessional that changed the country’s understanding of addiction. At best, a first lady’s memoir is an important historical document, intimately chronicling a White House administration and the powerful man running it. At worst — whoops, Nancy Reagan is calling in the astrologers again.

So where does “Melania” — a plain-black-covered book written by a woman who rightly assumes she needs no other introduction — fall into this pantheon? Let’s check:

“Over the next few months, we developed several items: the Fluid Day Serum, the Luxe Night with Vitamins A and E, cleansing balm, and an exfoliating peel, all priced between $50 and $150. In my meetings with chemists, I discovered the rejuvenating properties of caviar.”

Where are we? What are we doing? We’re trying to launch a retail empire, of course, as a 2011 Melania Trump teams up with a company run by “successful businesspeople” to introduce the American public (the “consumer base”) to a “line of high-end skincare products” because, after all, “people frequently asked me about my regimen, marveling at the health of my skin,” and so, you see, what she really wanted to do was find a way to “empower women,” and if that means charging you $150 an ounce to put fish eggs on your face, then so be it. Ladies, patriotism looks different for everyone.

Alas, Melania’s dreams were not to be. Despite previous “record-breaking sales” on QVC, where anonymous callers could not get enough of her braided gold chains, she writes, the skin-care line never got off the ground. No fault of her own, she assures us. She was betrayed by her manufacturer, forced to sue, filled with anger and disappointment. But she hopes “to have the opportunity to bring excellent skincare products to market in the future under more favorable circumstances.”

Look, I know I’m supposed to open with the abortion bombshell — Melania shares in the book that she supports abortion rights — but these random, drawn-out lotion notions seem far more illustrative of what makes Melania tick.

It’s admirable that she tried to start a business. Discussing the attempt could have been an opportunity for the former first lady to explore her relationship with her own beauty, the gift that built her career as a fashion model. Or, a chance for her to interrogate why, even married to a multimillionaire, her own financial independence remains one of her most essential “core values.” Instead, what we read is something we read repeatedly throughout “Melania.” She does something “superb” and “beautiful” and “perfect.” But other people are out to get her.

The villains are the usual suspects: the media, cancel culture, Democrats, the electoral process. Sometimes it’s the Obama administration, like when she alleges that their foot-dragging during the 2016 transition is what prevented her from commencing White House renovations and settling in Washington as early as she would have liked. Sometimes the betrayal is coming from inside the house: She blames her speechwriting team for plagiarizing parts of a Michelle Obama speech that Melania ended up redelivering at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Or, how about this: At 2:25 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, Melania’s press secretary texted her, asking whether she wanted to “denounce the violence.” Melania writes that she did not know what “the violence” referred to, and rather than ask — What is the violence? Sounds bad?! — she put down her phone and went back to supervising the “archival photographs” of all of her White House renovations, working with a “qualified team of photographers, archivists, and designers” to ensure “perfect execution.”

Her single-minded focus on this matter gains some context when you note that, within the book’s lengthy photo insert, the single event that bizarrely gets the most images (more than her wedding, more than her husband’s inauguration) is the renovation of the White House tennis pavilion. But still, the impression we are left with is that Melania is going out of her way to blame her staff for the fact that, on the day democracy came perilously close to ruin, the first lady couldn’t be pulled away from her scrapbooking.

What else? She disapproves of transgender athletes in sports. She still “questions” the result of the 2020 election. She really loves “block-chain technology,” which she uses to develop “block-chain verticals,” one of which is USA Memorabilia, where she hawks Christmas ornaments for $35 to $90.

She loves her husband. By now, this should come as no surprise. No matter what “Resistance Melania” baloney pussy-hatters might have once thought they saw in Melania’s inscrutable face, the former first couple has been married for nearly 20 years. Presumably she could have cashed out a long time ago if she had wanted to.

But “Melania” does provide some insights into why they work so well together. They both prize luxury, aesthetics and “finer things.” They both value independence within their relationship and never attempt to change one another: If Melania disagrees with her husband, she tells him privately but doesn’t take it personally if he ignores her advice. She sees a side of her husband that we don’t, she writes. In private, he is a “gentleman, displaying tenderness and thoughtfulness.”

Fine. But on the flip side, Melania’s memoir ends up revealing a side of her personality that we don’t usually see. She’s never relished the spotlight the way her husband has, she writes, and so for most of his four-year term, she tried to live as privately as possible. But she seems to wonder whether that decision worked against her, leading to “misrepresentation” and misunderstandings of who she is.

Now she has come to set the record straight, and what we learn is that she, too, can nurse a grudge like nobody’s business. She, too, is prone to self-mythologizing. She, too, can tell a story about visiting a suffering constituent — in this case, a gunshot victim of Las Vegas’s 2017 mass shooting — and somehow manage to turn it into a story of her own greatness.

“Please don’t stand up,” she instructed the man as he struggled to rise from his hospital bed.

“No, I want to stand up for you and the president. It’s my honor,” the gunshot victim allegedly replied.

And here, I admit it, I’m an awful person, but this is where I let out an exasperated snort. Because here, amid the QVC hawking and the chintzy ornaments and the designer clothes and the Be Best of it all — here is when I realized exactly what kind of first lady memoir I was reading. Not a treatise like Eleanor Roosevelt’s, not a confessional like Betty Ford’s, not a meditation on the transition from private to public life like Laura Bush’s, not a guidebook for working moms like Michelle Obama’s. “Melania” is a love story, actually. It’s about two famous vanity plates who truly are perfect for each other.

Melania

A Memoir

By Melania Trump

Skyhorse. 256 pp. $40