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Pamela Paul and Carlos Lozada dig into the former first lady’s “book-adjacent object.”

By Carlos Lozada and Pamela Paul

Produced by Derek Arthur

Melania Trump promoted her recent memoir, “Melania,” with a series of glossy and cryptic promotional videos stating the desire “to share my perspective: the truth.” But what does the self-titled memoir reveal to us about the often inscrutable former first lady? The bookish Opinion columnists Carlos Lozada and Pamela Paul discuss what they learned — and often, what they did not — from her work.

Below is a lightly edited transcript of the audio piece. To listen to this piece, click the play button above.

Carlos Lozada: Hi, I’m Carlos Lozada. I’m a New York Times Opinion columnist and co-host of the “Matter of Opinion” podcast. I am delighted to be joined by my friend and fellow columnist Pamela Paul.

Pamela Paul: Hey, Carlos.

Lozada: Good to see you, Pamela.

Paul: Good to be here.

Lozada: Pamela and I often just sit around and talk about books. So that’s what we’re going to do today. In a prior life, I was a book critic at The Washington Post. Pamela used to run The New York Times Book Review. So this is kind of the thing that we enjoy doing. And we both just read Melania Trump’s new memoir.

Advertisement: “Writing this memoir has been a deeply personal and reflective journey for me.”

It is just titled “Melania.”

Advertisement: “I believe it is important to share my perspective: the truth.”

And it’s this all-black dust jacket, just one word — Melania — in white and just one blurb on the back from, you guessed it, Donald Trump. It’s a pretty conventional memoir, in terms of what it covers. It’s Melania Trump’s childhood, her modeling career, her move to New York, her marriage to Donald Trump and then a somewhat selective reading of her experiences as a political wife, as the first lady and watching Donald Trump’s career.

But, Pamela, what did you make of the book?

Paul: It’s funny that you say that it’s like a conventional memoir, because I felt like it was barely a book. It’s a book-adjacent object, but it’s not actually a book. [Lozada laughs.]

Even the presentation of it, it’s with the one blurb and with the bio, which is, “Melania Trump is a former first lady of the United States, successful businessperson and former international fashion model. She resides in Palm Beach, Fla., with her family.” There’s no chance that Melania Trump wrote this, but we have no sign of who the ghostwriter is. I have an idea that it was written by someone who worked for a long time in fashion P.R. or marketing, maybe someone who spent some time writing captions for, like, Harper’s Bazaar magazine —

Lozada: That is incredibly specific.

Paul: — that it was then read by a Trump loyalist who was like: Insert political statement here. And despite all of that, what I think of as group effort, the style is sort of like a fifth- or seventh-grade girl writing Sidney Sheldon fan fiction. I thought a lot about the prose of this book, which was kind of remarkable. I know people are interested in the content, but to my mind, it’s almost contentless.

Lozada: When I said it feels like a conventional memoir, I meant that it feels like a conventional memoir in terms of the arc of what is ostensibly covered. Like childhood, early adulthood, forays into her career, then meeting Donald and then political life. It hits the beats you would imagine it to hit, but it’s one of the rare political memoirs where I feel that at the end I really don’t know more about the subject than I knew to begin with.

Paul: I actually got a sense of who she is as a person, and I think that is an extremely superficial, politically disengaged human being, the last kind of person who you would think of as a political wife.

You know what she struck me as? Did you see “White Lotus,” the second season?

Lozada: Yes, I did. I saw them both.

Paul: She was like the........

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