GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Former White House speechwriter Sean O’Brien will be in Grand Rapids Tuesday night promoting his debut novel White House Clubhouse.
O’Brien is formerly the director of speechwriting to Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden. Now he teaches a speechwriting class at Georgetown University and has traded speechwriting for writing fiction.
O'Brien was also a speechwriter for the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of the Navy, the chief of staff for two members of Congress, and a comedy performer with Chicago's Second City Theater.
White House Clubhouse is a middle-grade story featuring First Children Marissa and Clara as they adjust to their new life in the White House. But everything is turned upside down when they discover a secret passage that can take them back in time.
In this first adventure, they travel to the time when Teddy Roosevelt was president to help save California’s Redwood Forest.
In the works for about eight years, the book started to take shape while he was still a speechwriter.
O'Brien says he and his two kids Clare and Jay would come up with ideas during visits to the White House, and those ideas morphed into stories about time travel and living on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
O'Brien says they would pass notes through their lunch boxes with various ideas. He explains that throughout the entire writing process, his kids were his "best editors" and "toughest critics."
White House Clubhouse was inspired by an unusual wooden eagle table in the state dining room and they started to wonder if there might be a secret passageway beneath it.
"When I write speeches, and I teach this in my speechwriting class, it should all be done at a fifth-grade level, using those words that everybody can understand using short sentences," says O'Brien.
"That kind of prepared me for this idea of writing something that's going to be totally accessible to these readers. But my kids were my biggest check on that: 'Daddy, I don't understand that word.' 'Daddy, this is sounding too boring. Cut it.'"
O'Brien says he hopes that this book shows people that it's not just the "big names at the top" making an impact but it's their families and staff around them helping move history along.
"I want kids reading this stuff to understand that they can do that, too. They can have a major impact, you know, in their communities and their schools just by taking some action — daring greatly, as Teddy Roosevelt says in a little speech in this book. So that's what I hope kids take from it. But I also hope they have a lot of fun."
He plans to write about Marissa and Clara’s adventures for many books to come. The next one will go back in time to the War of 1812.
O’Brien will be at Schuler Books on 28th Street Tuesday night at 6 p.m. to read a portion of White House Clubhouse and answer questions.
You can reserve tickets for the event here.
