Former first lady Melania Trump’s new memoir has received yet another less-than-glowing review, this time from the author of the 2022 fictional novel “The Dictator’s Wife.”
Reading “Melania” is “to pass through the looking-glass,” Freya Berry wrote in a literary assessment for The Daily Beast published Wednesday.
“Trivial things are important. Important things barely register” and “there’s no sense of self-awareness that there might be slightly more at stake when, say, she spends a whole chapter on her White House renovations,” she said.
The “main tone is of a press release” and some sections sound “like a sales pitch,” Berry added, noting one particular brazen paragraph when Melania Trump’s “work for scholarships for foster children segues into a plug for her own memorabilia, in a whiplash that actually had me staring at the page, agape at its audacity.”
Berry has said Melania Trump “inspired the antiheroine” in her book, which per its Amazon listing centers on the “beautiful, enigmatic wife of a feared dictator.” Berry wrote in a separate review for the British i outlet published Tuesday that she penned her novel after following Melania Trump on the 2016 campaign trail and becoming “fascinated by her moral ambiguity.”
Berry is not the only person to offer a scathing critique of the ex-FLOTUS’ book.
A review from Vanity Fair senior editor Keziah Weir bluntly said, “Amid the glitter, though, the book is bad.” Weir described Trump at times as having “the narrative instincts of a hound in a fish store, following her nose from one exciting scent to the next, beginning anecdotes only to abandon them.”
Britain’s Daily Telegraph slapped a one star review on the book, calling it “deeply weird” and “hard to believe.” And The New York Times described it as “a brazen whitewash of a presidency” that is “slim and full of obfuscations.”
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Multiple critics have warned of America’s possible transformation into an authoritarian state should Trump beat Democratic rival Kamala Harris in next month’ vote. Trump himself has said he plans to act like a “dictator” only on “day one” of a potential second presidency.