Kate Anderson Brower’s The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House is full of surprising and moving details that illuminate day-to-day life at the White House. Combining incredible first-person anecdotes from extensive interviews with scores of White House staff members—many speaking for the first time—with archival research, Brower tells their story. She reveals the intimacy between the First Family and the people who serve them, as well as tension that has shaken the staff over the decades.
The wildly successful book has been adapted into an equally successful Netflix show of the same name. The show has recently topped the charts as the second most streamed show in the US.
In a recent interview with The Washingtonian, Brower went into how the story developed:
“Kate Andersen Brower was eating lunch with Michelle Obama when she came up with the idea for her first book.
It was 2011, Brower’s second year of reporting on the Obama administration for Bloomberg News. She’d dined in the White House before—“out of brown paper bags in the basement underneath the briefing room,” she says with a laugh. But this was different: a press luncheon hosted by the First Lady.
Brower was seated next to Obama, but her attention kept floating across the room in the East Wing—to one of the White House butlers. As the man flitted in and out, Brower noticed his rapport with the First Lady, how she called him by his first name. “It made me think: There’s this world of people who serve the President and the First Lady,” she says. That small observation would blossom into The Residence, Brower’s 2015 nonfiction book about the community of service staff working at the White House—and now an upcoming Shonda Rhimes–produced Netflix series of the same name.”
Read the full article at: https://www.washingtonian.com/2025/03/19/how-a-lunch-with-michelle-obama-led-to-netflixs-the-residence/
