With election day around the corner, Nicolle Wallace, the political commentator who recently served as senior advisor on the McCain-Palin campaign and news anchor Katie Couric, hosted a breakfast discussion last week at New York’s Soho House to launch Wallace’s upcoming novel, Eighteen Acres (Atria).

Wallace’s fiction debut imagines the lives of the first female president and two of her staff members as they face a tough reelection campaign. The book opens with Melanie Kingston, the chief of staff, dropping three BlackBerrys into her new $2,000 Dior purse.

Dior was also at the breakfast and despite tornado warnings, guests (including socialite Susan Fales-Hill, Daily Beast’s Tina Brown and agent Sloan Harris) showed up at the ritzy members only club dressed to the nines. Three photographers hovered and a goody bag contained a copy of Eighteen Acres and a certificate for $200 off a Botox Cosmetic Treatment and complimentary chemical peel.

Wallace said she started writing after an exhausting run with the 2008 presidential election. Vowing out of government tours forever, she still felt that there was a lot left unsaid about women in politics, and as she explained to former boss Couric—“it was the idea of writing about the first woman president [that] got me out of bed each morning and to the computer.”

The book is “partly an emotional response to the election” admitted Wallace, whose contentious relationship with Sarah Palin was spotlighted in Going Rogue. Yet it is not a retaliation (as fun as that sounds). Wallace instead toyed with the genre of political fiction as a medium for exploring the complexity or “indignities” of woman’s role in politics. Drawing mainly from her six years as a senior aid with the George W. Bush administration, she offers a glimpse into the inner workings of the White House from an ambitious female’s perspective, making politics—to quote our review—“both maddening and glamorous.”