Laura Bush speaks out on stress and life in a magazine interview

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Laura Bush, the former first lady, didn’t realize how stressful Washington was until she left it -- residing now in Dallas with the retired President George W. Bush, she writes about this and more in a memoir that will be released next week.

‘I didn’t realize how stressed I was until I wasn’t,’’ she says in an interview that appears in Ladies’ Home Journal, featuring the former first lady and her twin daughters on the June cover. ‘At the end of the book I write about the buoyancy of freedom I felt [when we left Washington]. It was literally almost physical. I felt like I could stand up straighter. I didn’t have any idea I was that stressed.’

Laura Bush, who next week will launch a two-month book tour in the Virginia suburbs of Washington and in Washington for the release of ‘Spoken From the Heart,’ writes about being an only child raised in Midland, Texas.

‘It was very lonely being an only child,’’ she tells the magazine, according to excerpts released Friday. ‘I think it was mainly because I was so aware of how my parents wanted other children, and how disappointed they were. And so I was disappointed. I wanted to have those brothers and sisters, too.’

She says this about the criticism that her husband, the 43rd president of the United States and son of the 41st, fielded during two terms in office -- particularly during the second term: ‘The criticism of political figures is so extreme, that they end up being characterized in a way that they’re not at all. And we knew that. When George’s dad was president, it was very hard for us to tolerate. We hated that. It’s too bad because I think it discourages people from even considering public office.’

-- Mark Silva

For more, see George Bush reads with a Kindle in the Swamp.