First novelist Kristin Gore read from her paperback “Sammy’s Hill: A Novel” (Miramax Books) at Barnes & Noble Upper West Side on Wednesday.

The author, a daughter of the former vice president, spoke about growing up around the world of politics in Washington, D.C. Her father was elected to his first term in Congress a few months before she was born. She said as an author, she followed the age-old advice of “write what you know.”

The book revolves around work and love in the nation’s capital. One scene, involving nighttime rollerblading through the long, marble halls of a government office building, was “inspired by personal experience.” It is something, Ms. Gore said, that could only be done after-hours.

The novel’s protagonist is Samantha Joyce, a young woman from Ohio who works in Washington as a healthcare policy adviser to an Ohio senator. Sammy is “a true idealist,” Ms. Gore said, one who wants to change the world, but is a little naive. The character has an active imagination: “She’s a huge hypochondriac with a penchant for imagining worst-case scenarios.” If scratched by a paper clip, she can imagine life-threatening medical maladies.

Ms. Gore read a passage about Sammy going out on a date with a speechwriter who works for a rival senator. She told the audience she didn’t use party labels in the novel, since she felt they would be distracting. She was more interested in whether the characters were in Washington to serve themselves or others.

One audience member asked the former Harvard Lampoon writer if she worked on the “Saturday Night Live” television episode her father hosted. Yes, she said, she worked on that episode. She also has written for several television shows, including “Futurama.”

Next she was asked who her favorite authors and books were. Some she named were Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” Tom Robbins’s “Jitterbug Perfume,” Milan Kundera’s “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” and the works of David Foster Wallace.

One audience member asked about having bodyguards while growing up in a famous family. In response, she described the awkward feeling of being thrust onto the national stage in 1992. She added, “You don’t need help feeling awkward at that age.”

The Gore family has kept busy. The former vice president will soon launch a cable and satellite channel; Kristin’s sister, Karenna Gore Schiff, has a forthcoming book, “Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who Shaped Modern America” (Miramax), and “Sammy’s Hill” will be made into a movie by Columbia Pictures. Ms. Gore is working on the screenplay, as well as a sequel.

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THINKING ABOUT THEM 192 Books in Chelsea has the feel of a pristine one-room schoolhouse. A crowd filled the store Tuesday to hear Francine du Plessix Gray read and discuss “Them: A Memoir of Parents” (Penguin Press). Her previous books include the novel “Lovers and Tyrants,” and a biography of French philosopher Simone Weil.

Her sweeping memoir describes her mother, Tatiana, a Russian-born aristocrat, and her father, Vicomte Bertrand du Plessix, a Frenchman whose plane was shot down by fascist artillery in the summer of 1940. Her mother and Russian emigre stepfather, Alexander Liberman, fled the Nazis and remade themselves as one of the most important power couples in postwar New York. She was a fashion-setter, as a hat designer for Saks; he rose to the top of the Conde Nast publishing empire. They knew everyone and entertained the likes of Salvador Dali and Marlene Dietrich.

Most moving in Ms. du Plessix Gray’s reading was the way she captured events through the eyes of a young girl. During their flight from Europe, the family was in a train station making no headway among the crowd of refugees. Her stepfather told young Francine to “pretend you’re sick.” She played the role to the hilt, “limping like Quasimodo,” while Liberman bellowed and pushed to the front shouting, “My child is sick” only to have her mother refuse to get aboard the overcrowded train. The drama turned operatic as Liberman thrust his stepdaughter’s luggage aboard. Her mother relented, and they made it to America.

This book “could not have been written while they were alive,” Ms. du Plessix Gray told the Knickerbocker, and had she tried doing so while they were living “it would have inevitably been fictionalized.” The memoir captures the contradictions of her mother’s and stepfather’s lives, including their swings from warm and intimate to manipulative and distant. “I wrote this to plumb the full mystery of character,” she said, which is “what a memoir should do.”

When asked about her parents’ love for each other, Ms. du Plessix Gray said she did not see their relationship, as she knew it, to be “love” but rather a kind of Slavic “obsession,” almost Dostoyevskian, a belief that each was the other’s “fate.”

In attendance were Jean Nathan, author of “The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright” (Picador), just out in paperback; a former Simon and Schuster executive, Wendy Nicholson; an editor at Henry Holt, Jack McCrae, and Melanie Fleishman of 192 Books, who helped put the evening together.

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HAIKU HOMER Harvard-educated David Bader has a book out called “Haiku U” (Gotham Books), featuring “100 Great Books in 17 Syllables” from Aristotle to Zola. Mr. Bader’s aunt, Pauline Gilbert Bader, sent a copy to the Knickerbocker. The haiku book encapsulates classics in a nutshell. Here’s “The Iliad” by Homer: “Sing, Goddess, of how / brooding Achilles’ mood swings / caused him to act out.” And Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: “His mother wed his / dead murdered father’s brother!’/ Next Jerry Springer.”