Elsa Walsh, why did you write "Divided Lives"?

Is this your first book?

Was it hard?

Could you give us a real brief synopsis of the three women, and we'll go back and go over it in detail.

The next woman is a woman named Rachael Warby, classical music conductor, very talented, who performed all over the world, met a man in her early 40s...

How many women did you think about writing about?

The reason that we first noticed this book, a network like this was Rachael Warby because she's married to the governor of West Virginia.

What was the first controversy that arose around that story?

I wasn't surprised in some ways that the press picked up on the sex revelations, but I was a little disappointed that they were presented as this sort...

I don't know. I don't really understand that.

No, she didn't call me and tell me. I had heard that morning, in fact, that she was going to do that, and I was surprised because I thought that she...

It was in July, the end of July.

At that stage? Gaston Caperton, her husband who is the governor of West Virginia, is in his second term as governor. He can't run again, and his term...

Yes, when she first met him. And when Rachael Warby first met Gaston Caperton, she was married to somebody else, an agent-film producer who was living...

No, I have not. I've talked to her publicist and I've talked to some of her aides.

I gave Rachael the book way back in late winter, early spring. I gave it to all the women. And at that time she called me and she said, "One, it was...

What were your ground rules with all three of these women?

A couple weeks ago, you open up New Yorker magazine and there you are, at the very early part of the magazine, in a confrontation with Charlie Peters,...

And I said, "Well, you know, I've already sent it to both Rachael Warby and Gaston Caperton, and they've both seen it. And you don't really need to...

You mentioned your husband. Has that figured into this story? I mean, do people either not want to talk to you or talk to you because of who you're...

I mean -- for the audience who doesn't know who your husband is...

And in the back -- I mean, the only reason I bring this up -- anybody following journalism would know these names and those who don't follow journalism...

Are you surprised how much controversy the Rachael Warby thing has been?

There's a fellow you quote a lot in here by the name of L.T. Anderson. Why did you quote him?

As a matter of fact, there's a quote I underlined. It's: "So now we know Ms. Warby isn't bored only by cocktail party dullards, she's bored by an entire...

Now she later corrected herself in another interview, but sort of amplified it by saying, "I don't read the local newspapers because I never like to...

Right. When the governor was running for re-election in early 1991, Jay Rockefeller, who was the former governor who's now the US senator from West...

I heard Sharon Rockefeller say that and I think it's probably smart because when you're a political spouse and there's a lot of demand on your time...

Meredith Vieira is now at ABC. She is on a show called "Turning Point," which is a magazine show, one-hour documentary which for a while was playing...

Did I read it right that Robert Barnett is both your agent and her agent?

How did that happen? Was that just a happenstance?

Married to Rita Braver.

Now what role does an agent play for you in all this?

How's that work?

How does it work? Where does he live?

How long have you been married to Bob Woodward?

What influence has he had on this style of journalism here that you've used?

For example, Rachael Warby, the conductor and first lady, she had insisted to me for almost a year that she was never going to have a child, that after...

And so I said "Well, Rachael, what's happened?" And she said, "Well, talking to you has made me listen to myself and made me realize that the answers...

I'm from California, from the Bay Area, come from a large Irish Catholic family. My parents are Irish immigrants. My dad's a civil engineer. And when...

Straight from Ireland, from County Cork. It used to sound very romantic to me. Now it sounds really impulsive. My mom had one child at that point, so...

Six -- five girls, one boy.

I went to college at Berkeley, which is across the bay from where I was raised. My step-daughter's is there now.

I studied rhetoric and economics. I started out being an economics major because I thought I wanted to go to law school, discovered, in fact, that I...

Well, my senior year at Berkeley I did an internship at Newsweek magazine in their San Francisco bureau. And it was, as a lot of people's experience...

Going to go back to The Post?

What did you learn about -- I know you learned a lot about Meredith Vieira, but what did you learn about "60 Minutes," which is probably the most popular...

What I discovered was that it was an intensely hard-working place. I didn't realize that, in fact, each correspondent has about five or six producers...

Because you're on the road all the time. Morley Safer, who is one of the correspondents there, his hobby is painting watercolors of hotel rooms. They're...

They're good. They're good. And when Meredith left "60 Minutes" after her two seasons there and didn't really know what she was going to do, felt that...

She traveled part-time, she worked full-time. I mean, it's kind of been -- people who follow television, and there's probably not a lot of people who...

He is producing a show on cable for one of Meredith's former colleagues, Jane Wallace on Fox ...

FX channel. One of the really interesting things that happened after my book came out is that Don Hewitt called me. He's the executive producer of the...

With Meredith?

Pain every day, and on every page of my book, Meredith describes never being able to leave the house without crying. She says, "I know that was a little...

And she said, "Well, maybe I'll take Ben" -- which is her son -- "with me." And her producer said, "You can't do that. You know, what if the baby gets...

One of the things when you read, especially about the surgeon and about Meredith Vieira, you realize they're both making about a half-million dollars....

... how could it be that hard?

With Alison Estabrook, the breast surgeon, she told me that since the book has come out she's had a number of people in the hospital, people who are...

Two hundred and eighty-four pages. How long has this book been out now?

What has surprised you about the experience of the book tour, writing the book that you didn't expect?

And what I was really doing at that stage was stalling, kind of going through the list of women in my mind that I knew. I have a lot of really good...

Yes.

Yes, for the most part. I mean, I've had a lot of coverage, a lot more coverage than I anticipated. That was a big surprise to me. I wish the stories...

Right.

Howard Stringer, who used to be the former head of CBS, who is now heading up some new kind of cable television thing that's a little bit up in the...

Yes, very good friend of hers. They traveled when they were 16 or 17 to a kibbutz together in Israel, although Alison's not Jewish, she wanted to spend...

I met Alison by happenstance at at a dinner party, and she had this story to tell. One of the things I did when I was first starting out doing my book...

We talked about that because I initially wanted them to put pictures in there, and I think they thought that ... I never got really a real answer. They...

I tape recorded a lot of my interviews. Not all of them, but many of them.

I have them. I always ke...

I always keep my tapes.

Oh, I'm a pack rat. I keep everything. I kept all my notes from stories I've done, or most of my notes of important stories that I've ever done.

Right.

Right. Howard Stringer's wife, Jennifer Patterson, was a dermatologist, who was a very good friend of Alison's. They had met when they were residents...

So she was a person who had a lot of -- again, good women friends who were sort of her sounding board. So she called one of her friends, who is a psychiatrist,...

And I think that this is sort of the next stage of the workplace battles that the woman lawyer -- that lawyer was probably giving her pretty good advice...

In this book?

From all the stories?

One, I think that they don't really understand all the dilemmas that a woman brings to her job. I mean, I think when Don Hewitt, the "60 Minutes" producer,...

In Rachael Warby's case, when she discovered her husband was going to be challenged in the primary for re-election, it really just flummoxed her and...

Yes, I have.

Alison Estabrook has said that she finds it to be a kind of an amazing bonding process for her because, as I said, a number of patients have come up...

Pardon?

Oh, she told me that somebody in the hospital, one of the superiors said, "You know, Alison" -- my book was excerpted in The Washington Post and this...

She's still the head, but there's a new chairman of the surgery department --has replaced one who really, in fact, was one of the obstacles in her getting...

At Columbia Presbyterian. She's been offered jobs in a lot of different places, places that want a woman as head of their breast surgery department....

I gave the book to Meredith, again, early on and Meredith said it was very hard to read. She said she she liked it very much. She said, "I love it.'...

A lot of crying.

No, because I think that one of the big problems in this country is now that women tend to think, "Oh, you can't cry. You can't tell the truth. You...

OK.

No, actually, he asked me to put it in there. I had initially just described it as a degenerative neurological disease because Meredith had asked me...

I really was able to do most of the cutting myself. I mean, my editor really did stylistic and grammatical change, but no factual.

Do you have a good idea?

The CD-ROM.

I hope so. I've got a couple of different ideas, but I think that one of the problems that you have sometimes after you write a book is you live so...

I learned that I needed to keep my own life in balance and in perspective, and that it was important for me to be honest when something was bothering...

I think it's therapeutic. I think that when you talk about -- when you tell the truth about your life, it gives you insight and insight allows you to...

I would hope so. I...

To me?

I worry that people would think that because of the reaction to Rachael Warby that they would say, "Oh, there's still a penalty for telling the truth."...

Thank you.