The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty

by Susan Page

pointed than funny. When she went to summer camp at age twelve, Barbara recalled with chagrin, she weighed 148 pounds. In her memoir, Barbara’s fondest childhood memories seemed to revolve around eating. “The best food in the world came out of our kitchen,” she wrote, prepared not by her mother but by the household staff of two. On Sundays, when the cook had the afternoon off, the Pierce family would eat a big lunch—“baked chicken with the world’s best stuffing and mashed potatoes”—and make do in the evening with graham crackers and cream. “A glorious dish,” she exulted. In a youthful episode that became family lore, Barbara at age ten bought a can of Marshmallow Fluff—the name is an apt clue of its sticky sweetness—and happily dug into the tin with her fingers to eat as she walked home. By the time she arrived there, her mother had gotten three phone calls from neighbors reporting the cute scene. “Mother did not think it was quite so cute,” she recalled. Pauline felt humiliated. Barbara became violently sick. She could never bring herself to eat Marshmallow Fluff again. The friction between them was hard to miss, especially given how Pauline doted on her older daughter.