![]() “Because that club is so exclusive and secretive,” she says, “it took me two years to find a source.” The club appears in one of the novel’s delicious chapter breaks, which explain to outsiders the secret codes of some of D.C.’s power hubs. Inspired by the skewering Tom Wolfe gave Manhattan’s one percent in Bonfire of the Vanities, she showed up to galas and the Chevy Chase Country Club, and eventually, a friend of a friend got her into the Alibi Club, one of old Washington’s most exclusive venues. Upon arriving back in town, McDowell began her research. but in Christina McDowell’s The Cave Dwellers the city’s true power brokers know better. To outsiders, the White House might be the center of power in Washington, D.C. “My parents endured-or maybe didn't endure-a scandal here my father was indicted for fraud, he went to prison, and so I had been away for a really long time.” “I came as kind of an insider turned outsider, given my personal story,” says McDowell. Still, for McDowell, making a return wasn’t always easy. She’s not coming at it with a major agenda or with a knife in her hand, she’s approaching it with equanimity and telling it like it is.” But an elephant never forgets, and that’s why she’s the perfect person to do this. Everything blew up in her face, but she handled it with such dignity and grace, and she still has a wink in her eye. I publish 98% fiction but when I had her memoir in, I found it so interesting-she scraped together a life as a writer. “Christina rose to the occasion in such an extraordinary way. “It’s so rare to read stories of people who’ve had it all and then lost it,” says Alison Callahan, McDowell’s book editor. McDowell on a Los Angeles red carpet in 2018. After that, her family-no longer living the high life-moved to Los Angeles where she picked up acting jobs and did a stint on reality TV. McDowell’s father, as she wrote in her 2015 memoir After Perfect, ended up in prison after being indicted for stock fraud the real-life Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belfort testified against him. She grew up around what she calls “quiet power,” explaining, “a childhood friend of mine's grandfather worked on the atomic bomb, and that sort of thing that is very specific to Washington.” But it wasn’t entirely a fairy tale. She had the kind of charmed childhood that the Washington Post once described as “spent on a sprawling Georgian estate around the corner from the Kennedys’ Hickory Hill, and summers in the house in Nantucket, Mass.” ![]() McDowell was born in Georgetown and later lived in the affluent suburb of McLean, Virginia. That owes as much to McDowell’s sharp and insightful work as it does to her own status as someone who’s been on both sides of the doors to Washington’s most important rooms. The Cave Dwellers would be a page turner no matter when it was released, but in today’s climate-with Washington more closely watched than ever, the prestige of elected office evolving, and even local grande dame Sally Quinn declaring the city’s social scene more or less extinct-it practically qualifies as required reading. Washington, D.C.’s Embassy Row, where some of The Cave Dwellers’ most memorable scenes play out. Instead, it tackles ideas about family, friendship, belonging, and the fickle nature of influence-all playing out, of course, during tense meals at stuffy country clubs, at drug-fueled parties at the Russian ambassador’s mansion, and along the manicured avenues of Georgetown. The Cave Dwellers follows a multi-generational group of Washingtonians navigating the complicated waters of social and political survival in the wake of a gruesome murder of a local family inside their mansion, but it’s more than a whodunnit. Offering a glimpse into a world of money, power, and tradition that has for years had an outsized impact on the way the country operates, the novel uses a scalpel where others might deploy a hatchet. McDowell’s novel The Cave Dwellers, out now, is a keenly observed, compelling story that reveals the inner workings of one of America’s most secretive tribes. Jackie and Robert Kennedy at a 1957 dinner in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood, the natural habitat of the city’s "cave dwellers." Historical // Getty ImagesĪnd she was.
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