Chick lit meets Obama White House in frothy memoir, 'From the Corner of the Oval'

An oval office has no corners, logically, and so the title of Beck Dorey-Stein’s new memoir, “From the Corner of the Oval” ( Spiegel & Grau, 330 pp., ★★½ out of four) is a clever description of her time as a political nonfactor –  a stenographer – blending into the woodwork of the Obama administration.

Housed in the vast confines of the EEOB, or Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a city-block sized civic cathedral next to the White House, Dorey-Stein was part of the team tasked with recording and transcribing every public presidential utterance, speech or interview. Not an inconsequential job, but Wesleyan grad Dorey-Stein was overqualified to handle recording devices and do some requisite typing.

The harder part was gaining security clearance to work so closely to POTUS. But Dorey-Stein’s brief tenure tutoring at Washington D.C.’s Sidwell Friends School, where the Obama daughters (and Vice President Joe Biden’s granddaughters) were enrolled, smoothed her way to a White House post. Before that, she had been kicking around D.C., mostly jobless but agreeably footloose, in the manner of post-graduate aspirants to the good life.

Clearly, this is a chronicle of privilege – the flights on Air Force One, accompanying POTUS and the press around the globe, from Kansas or Peoria to Punta Cana and Hawaii and even the University of Rangoon, swilling away the off-hours at good hotel bars on Obama’s re-election trail in 2011, chasing romance and status with all the other lucky twenty- and thirty-somethings.

Obama is a bit player in Dorey-Stein’s story, though. She encounters him at a fitness-center treadmill, and he nods his encouragement amid some casual conversation in which he recalls his 20s and how he met first lady Michelle.

But there’s no insight into politics or policy, nor any behind-the-scenes presidential tension. White House players such as strategist David Plouffe or press spokesman Jay Carney glide in and out, benignly. What’s at stake, mainly, is the author’s love life, as it pings around a triangle involving a hollow fellow staffer, Jason, and a nice guy named Sam.

The book offers a steady stream of meet-cute moments. Dorey-Stein encounters hunky staffers and Secret Service guys and begins her White House tenure stumbling comically with her unstylish suitcase, misplacing her underwear, even! (“Today, I’ll be traveling commando with the commander in chief.”)

It shamelessly echoes its chick-lit model, “The Devil Wears Prada,“ as the women in Dorey-Stein’s cohort dish out the side-eye and are duly cited for their expensive Tumi luggage and “steep Tory Burch high heels with the circle logo on the toe.”

The sense that this is mainly a 300-page treatment for a Saoirse Ronan vehicle or a Netflix series is solidified by the implausible perfection of Dorey-Stein’s first D.C. boyfriend, who materializes animatronically on page 14, “tall, with sandy brown hair … his bear paw of a hand... the sportsman’s scruff and moss-green eyes.”  Their initial breakup is so maudlin, even by rom-com standards, that not even artistic license the size of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building can sell it.

In fairness, Dorey-Stein warns us in a prefatory note that “I’ve used pseudonyms, composites and other forms of disguise. In some instances, I have rearranged and/or compressed events and time periods in service of the narrative.”

In other words, let’s not burden things with reality since, you know, you get the idea. Of course, we expect such truthiness from our biopics and docudramas, but in the context of something so recent and so concrete as the Obama administration, this feels like an abdication.

Yes, Dorey-Stein is a lively writer, and her tale makes for fizzy beach reading –evaporating, alas, like many a White House gig after election day.

WSOC