Gretchen Whitmer Is Swimming With Sharks

Among the big gambles in book publishing is picking a publication date months in advance of a book’s release, a process that is half tea-leaf reading and half wild guesswork. Will a new book drop in a week when a scandal blots out all media coverage? Or will it coincide with a news event that gives the book a peg and its author a huge boost in visibility?

Back in the spring, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and her team at Simon & Schuster chose July 9 to publish True Gretch, her new memoir–slash–inspirational guidebook. “I wanted to put it out early enough in this election cycle that it gave me something positive to talk about,” Whitmer, dressed in a cupcake-pink dress in the lobby of the midtown Hilton, told me brightly the day after its release. “And give people a laugh, or some hope, in this hard and heavy election year.” It would be a distraction for politicos in advance of Donald Trump’s scary party convention in Milwaukee and far enough ahead of the Democrats’ own August convention that it would not make it seem as though she were trying to bigfoot her heat-seeking peers.

Join us for Dinner Party, a lively evening newsletter about everything that just happened. Sign up to get it every weeknight.