Nancy Pelosi Airs Some Clean Laundry in 'Power'

Anything she wanted to be. She was extraordinarily talented. . . . She made an invention of her own, which she had a patent on, and she had a business sense. But the times and my father and just the obligations of family had their limitations for her.

I think if she had been born later . . . she would have maybe still had seven children, but I think she would have been able to follow some of her own pursuits as well.

The thing that she patented was?

Oh, she patented something that was the first patent ever received for applying steam to your face. Her grandmother had given her a formula that you put in and the water boils and steam comes up and it's good for your skin. She had beautiful skin. And it was called Velvex. V-e-l-v-e-x. Which was sort of a modern kind of a name when I think back on it. Velvex. And she was so proud of that, and she called it her brainchild.

But it would have involved travel, and that was completely out of the question.

Not long after you first met Paul Pelosi, but before you started dating or even became friends, he casually asked you if you'd mind picking up his shirts when you went to the cleaners. How did you ever let him live that down?

He has never lived it down! You're reading about it in the book! I think probably I may have gotten his attention that way, because there were a lot of people who would have loved to pick up Paul Pelosi's shirts, but I was not among them. [They met at the house of a mutual friend; she said she'd do him the favor and put his ticket in her pocket, but inadvertently returned from the cleaners with only her own clothes.] I totally forgot the minute I walked out the door, totally forgot -- which I think made an impression on him.

Then later, after we were married, he asked me if I would iron a shirt and that didn't happen, either. . . . I always said, "You know, people make a living doing this and we should support that part of our economy."

You refer to the mystique of the old boys' club [in Congress during the 1980s] as the "Secret Sauce Club."

The men had ruled the roost for such a long time, and they liked that environment. They had this attitude of, "We know how to get this done, and there's a secret sauce to it." They never said it that way, but that's how I heard it: "There's a secret sauce, and you can't possibly know the recipe because we do."

In my view, the goal was not to go there and change their behavior but just to prevail in the debate. . . . You know, once you have a gavel in your hands, everyone knows who the speaker is.