What Change Could Look Like

NICOLLE WALLACE, the tough, savvy and hard-charging conservative political operator, was laughing and explaining why Melanie Kingston, the tough, savvy and hard-charging conservative political operator who just so happens to be a protagonist in Mrs. Wallace’s first novel, “Eighteen Acres,” isn’t like her at all.

“I’m flattered frankly when people see me in her,” Mrs. Wallace said, referring to her fictional character — the first female chief of staff to the first female president, Charlotte Kramer. “She is so devoted to the job that there’s nothing else in her life. People who know me know I was very devoted, very loyal, but was always like, ‘Can I go now?’ ”

She laughed and, miming a White House staffer ready to flee for the day, flopped across the table at Bistro Lepic, a cozy French haunt in upper Georgetown that she used to frequent before moving to New York four years ago. And Mrs. Wallace, whose gray-blue eyes and dark blond bob give her the look of the Northern California girl that she is, should know. She used to be that West Wing staffer.

She worked as President George W. Bush’s communications director before signing on with Senator John McCain’s presidential bid in 2008. The McCain-Palin campaign was troubled from the outset, and Mrs. Wallace emerged as a scapegoat, bearing the blame for everything from the spending spree that a McCain aide later called “Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus” to Gov. Sarah Palin’s disastrous interview with Katie Couric.

“It was just so demoralizing and humiliating,” Mrs. Wallace said. “I was so wounded by the accusations about going shopping. I was like, ‘My God, I was the White House communications director for six years, I wrote speeches about wars, and people think I went to Neiman Marcus and bought her skirts.’ How did that happen?”

When Mrs. Palin’s book, “Going Rogue,” came out the next year, Mrs. Wallace was a prime target.

“It was just embarrassing and hurtful and sad,” said Mrs. Wallace, who hasn’t read the book. “I was surprised by how delusional her account was, but I think she was so desperate to offer some explanation to her devoted followers.”

But now, Mrs. Wallace is back in the political fray on her own terms, with a debut novel named after the 18 acres on which the White House sits.

“I was a campaign press secretary,” she said. “It is still so surreal to me that there is a book in your purse with my name on it.”

The book is an engaging, easy read, told from the alternating points of view of three female characters — a president, a chief of staff and an up-and-coming television anchor. The plot turns on an explosive affair (First Husband, anyone?) and a disaster in the Middle East, neither of which seems implausible.

Mrs. Wallace, who was inspired to write a book after reading “The Devil Wears Prada” during Mr. Bush’s first term, said that she wanted to capture the current moment in Washington.

“It feels new, like it’s different from the way it was 10 years ago, but it feels fleeting, too, like it’s going to be different in another 10 years,” she said. “I don’t know that the press will always be so interconnected and incestuously connected to the person they cover.”

But she didn’t want to write a roman à clef with easily recognizable characters.

“Mike McCurry told me, ‘Don’t keep a diary,’ so I never wrote anything down,” she said. “We were freaked out. You never wanted to be the one loser who’d been keeping a diary of everything everyone said for eight years.”

Which is not to say she wanted for material. The McCain campaign was turbulent, and to those working for him, it often seemed as if anything that could go wrong did go wrong. Take, for instance, the Couric interview and what should have been a softball question about what newspapers Mrs. Palin read.

“I mean in hindsight, she never should have done any interviews,” Mrs. Wallace said. She recounted this in an upbeat, almost amused way, with the tone of someone who has struggled but moved on. She laughed, as if she still couldn’t quite believe how it all unfolded, and added: “I wish she’d just Tweeted. She should have been our Twitterer. But at the time, I grossly overestimated her capacity to answer questions about world affairs, about how her personal points of view were shaped.”

On Election Day, Mrs. Wallace didn’t even vote for the McCain-Palin ticket.

“I didn’t, I didn’t,” she said slowly. She never received her absentee ballot — “and I was fine with that,” she admitted.

Still, Mrs. Wallace said she now wears the entire experience “as a badge of honor.”