‘Speaking for Myself’ by Sarah Huckabee Sanders

In her memoir, the former White House press secretary recounts being called out by Michelle Wolf, being asked to leave a restaurant, a wink from Kim Jong-un and more.

“In the raging battle between the president and the media, I often felt like I was on the front lines in no-man’s land,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders writes in her memoir, “Speaking for Myself,” which comes out on Tuesday. “In one of my first briefings in my new role, I noted that I was the first mom to ever hold the job of White House press secretary, and said to my daughter, Scarlett, ‘Don’t listen to the critics. Fulfill your potential, because in America you still can.’”

“Speaking for Myself” details how she came to heed her own advice when “nothing was off-limits to the angriest Trump haters: my character, my weight and appearance, even my fitness to be a mother.” Sanders sometimes takes a granular approach — sharing the logistics of a prank she pulled along with fellow seniors at Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., or describing chandeliers in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, the back dining room off the Oval Office and at the Riyadh Ritz. Elsewhere, she writes about a wink from Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea, and family visits to the White House, where the president once dropped “an explosive f-bomb” in front of her daughter.

Sanders briefly mentions several issues that roiled the United States during her time in the Trump administration: health care, the travel ban, race relations, mass shootings and family separation. Some only appear in the text of a satirical poem, written and read by Greg Clugston of Standard Radio at a holiday lunch hosted by White House correspondents in 2017. For example: “In Charlottesville we witnessed long-simmering divides, / Trump drew fire citing ‘fine people on both sides.’”