Page 55 - Time Magazine, Sep. 17, 2018

Goodwin at the Concord Bookshop in Concord, Mass. For pleasure reading, she opts for mysteries

obstacles have been overcome before. a week (the historic tavern where we had lunch
“It’s like being in war so long, you don’t know is their Thursday spot). She’s big into mysteries.
what peace is like,” Goodwin says. “We’ve been And she makes time for family and neighbors. One
at each other’s throats so long in Washington. To of her sons lives in Concord with his family, and
know and remember what bipartisanship is like, ‘It’s like their town is the kind where people stop to say
that’s what I want people to see. We had it.” being hello—including five separate times during our
That possibility of a better world isn’t limited to in war postlunch visit to the Concord Bookshop.
politics. All of her subjects earn her praise for tak- so long, She’s also taking a slower-paced approach to the
ing time to retreat, reflect and pause amid crisis. If question of what comes next. She wants to finish
you think work emails arriving in your inbox dur- you don’t the book her husband was writing when he died,
ing vacation makes that impossible, think again. know which she describes as a “love letter to the idea of
“If Lincoln during the Civil War can go to the what America.” Several film projects based on her work
theater a hundred times, and if FDR during World peace is are in progress—Spielberg has moved on to her
War II can have a cocktail hour every night where like.’ Teddy Roosevelt/William Howard Taft book, and a
you can only talk about books you’ve read and gos- miniseries drawn from her FDR work may happen,
DORIS KEARNS
sip, and if Teddy Roosevelt can take two hours too—and she has started a production company
GOODWIN,
every afternoon to exercise,” she says, none of us on the state of with her manager. She’s not sure she wants to spend
has an excuse. “We just keep thinking our time is U.S. politics another decade on a biography. If the right person
more complicated. It is because we’ve made it so.”
came along, maybe. But that would mean moving
TONY LUONG FOR TIME she watches her beloved Boston Red Sox, she says, her books again, and that doesn’t feel right, not yet.
Goodwin is pretty good at pausing too. When
“It’s still just too close to this one,” she says. “I’d
feel like I was betraying these guys before they’d
she thinks about only baseball, and she has made

a ritual of eating out with friends multiple times
even come back to life.”
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