Before MacKenzie Scott became MacKenzie Bezos in 1993, she was an English major at Princeton, where Toni Morrison considered her one of the “best” students the Nobel laureate had ever taught in a creative-writing class. Twenty years ago, Scott published her first novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, followed by a second, Traps, in 2013.

Now, as the well-known philanthropist releases her latest work of fiction, Last Days in Two Nations—a serialized dystopian novel available for free on Substack—take a look back at Vogue’s 2013 profile of Scott.

“A Novel Perspective” by Rebecca Johnson was originally published in the March 2013 issue of Vogue.

For more of the best from Vogue’s archive, sign up for our Nostalgia newsletter here.

Before I met her, my only image of MacKenzie Bezos came from the author photo on her first book, The Testing of Luther Albright. In it, she looks delicate and otherworldly but a bit uneasy, as if she’s not fully sure of herself or this whole novel-writing venture. When she shows up at the Thai restaurant in Bellevue, Washington, a Seattle suburb, where we’re meeting for lunch to talk about Traps, her latest novel, I quickly see how wrong that impression was. She does have an ethereal quality, with pale skin and high cheekbones, but she’s not hesitant at all. At least, not anymore.

She admits that her first book took ten years and “a lot of tears” to finish. Granted, she was juggling other things during that time—moving across the country, raising four children (three boys and a girl, aged seven to twelve), and helping her husband launch a fledgling business called Amazon.com. “Jeff is my best reader,” she says of her more famous spouse, who will happily clear his schedule for the day, read her manuscript in one sitting, and give her detailed feedback. To finish Traps more quickly, she pushed herself to skip those comforts. “Not talking about it to Jeff gave me an extremely rewarding incentive,” she says. “The sooner I finished, the sooner I could share it with him and discuss these characters who had been occupying so much of my mind. By the last three months, they felt so real and important to me that I could start crying just thinking about them while driving to pick up the kids from school.”

A slim, fast-paced novel that follows the lives of four diverse women over four days in and around the Los Angeles area, Traps is tight but nuanced—a character-driven thriller that’s both suspenseful and smart. As she did in her first book, which was named a Los Angeles Times book of the year and used the mysteries of plumbing as a metaphor for the intricate bonds of family intimacy, Bezos gives her characters a wide range of professions—from animal rescuer to teen prostitute—and uses those jobs to reveal how their lives have stumbled or stalled. A high-level security consultant is great at spotting threats but struggles with vulnerability in relationships. A movie star has millions of fans but hasn’t spoken to her mother in years. Unlike Luther, which felt like a tour de force of domestic realism but wasn’t necessarily a fun read—try spending a year in the head of a self-absorbed civil engineer—Traps crackles with ready-made Hollywood drama.

Photo: Tim Hout

Growing up in San Francisco, the daughter of a financial planner father and a mother who cheerfully stayed home to cook and decorate, MacKenzie was bookish and shy—the kind of girl who would spend hours alone in her bedroom writing elaborate stories. She attended Hotchkiss and then Princeton, a school she chose partly for the chance to study fiction under Toni Morrison, a mentor to this day who calls Bezos “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes…really one of the best.” It was Morrison who made the crucial recommendation of Amanda “Binky” Urban as a literary agent.

Bezos acknowledges that having a husband worth $20 bMeeting her husband might seem like winning the lottery—especially for someone who wants to write literary fiction, which isn’t exactly the most lucrative career—but she’s also smart enough to know her luck started long before Jeff Bezos came along. “I’m definitely a lottery winner of a certain kind,” she says, referring to her husband’s success, “and it makes my life wonderful in many ways, but that’s not the lottery I feel defined by. The fact that I got wonderful parents who believed in education and never doubted I could be a writer, the fact that I have a spouse I love—those are the things that define me.”

Meeting her husband may have been a stroke of luck—he was the first person she interviewed with at a New York hedge fund back in the nineties (a job to pay the bills while she wrote)—but getting him to notice her romantically was all her doing. “My office was next door to his, and all day long I listened to that fabulous laugh,” she remembers. “How could you not fall in love with that laugh?” She started her campaign to win him over by suggesting lunch. Within three months of dating, they were engaged. Three months after that, they were married. At the time, she was 23 years old. This isn’t the work of a woman who’s uncertain about anything. Shortly after, when Jeff began describing his idea for a business that sold books over the Internet, she was ready to uproot their lives in New York and move to Seattle. “I have no business sense whatsoever,” she says, “but I saw how excited he was.”

On the other hand, Jeff Bezos didn’t need much convincing when it came to the Princeton graduate in the next-door office. “I think my wife is resourceful, smart, brainy, and hot, but I had the good fortune of having seen her résumé before I met her, so I knew exactly what her SATs were.” Which were? “I’ll never tell,” he answers, letting out that famous Bezos laugh.

Theirs is, by all accounts, one of those complementary marriages where the two parts come together to form an even stronger whole. “Jeff is the opposite of me,” MacKenzie admits. “He likes to meet people. He’s a very social guy. Cocktail parties for me can be nerve-racking. The brevity of conversations, the number of them—it’s not my sweet spot.” She can, however, rise to the occasion when needed, as she did last year to cohost the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute Gala, where she dazzled in a floor-length red-and-fuchsia gown by Juan Carlos Obando. When it comes to clothes, though, she’s more the jeans-and-T-shirt type; it’s her husband who will come home with something that’s caught his eye, like the Diane von Furstenberg woven silver leather bag she’s carrying the day we meet (very Game of Thrones). “I pay attention to what she likes to wear, and you’d be amazed by how often things work,” Bezos says about buying his wife clothes. “Sometimes I call her and say, ‘What’s your such-and-such size?’ and she says, ‘Why?’ and I say, ‘None of your business!’ It delights her.” He adds, “I highly recommend it to any man.”

“Jeff is obviously the extrovert who can make a speech on the spur of the moment; she is the one who is constantly observing,” says Danny Hillis, a longtime friend of the couple’s whose Wikipedia page—inventor, cancer researcher—reads like something out of a science-fiction novel. “Family is very important to Jeff, and he absolutely relies on her to create that stable home life. They are such a normal, close-knit family, it’s almost abnormal.”

Creating stable, close-knit families takes a lot of time and effort; so does writing complex, richly detailed novels. The real reason MacKenzie’s first novel took ten years to write wasn’t laziness—her husband can recall waking up on many a vacation to find his wife in the hotel bathroom, tapping away on her computer. The novel took as long as it did because she decided to put her writing on hold after her children were born, a painful but necessary bow to the reality of human limitations.As Cyril Connolly famously said, “There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” She reflects, “Writing is such a pretend profession. Nobody is counting on you at all. You can’t pretend to be a lawyer or a teacher. It takes a lot of grit to keep going. Kids, on the other hand, urgently need to be taken care of. After the third child, I realized I couldn’t be the kind of parent I wanted to be and still write. Those years were just too busy.”

It would have been easy to hire a team of nannies to look after the children, but that was never her style as a parent. In fact, over the years, she and Jeff have occasionally tried homeschooling. “We experimented with all sorts of things,” she says, “like traveling off-season, doing kitchen-science projects, incubating chickens, taking Mandarin lessons, using the Singapore math program, and joining lots of clubs and sports with other neighborhood kids.” These days, to ensure she gets a full, uninterrupted day of writing, Bezos rents a one-bedroom apartment near their family home. But when school lets out, she’s the one who picks up the kids and drops them off in her Honda minivan, the classic mom-mobile. Seeing her in the school parking lot in jeans, boots, and a leather jacket, you’d never guess at her enormous wealth—and that’s exactly how she likes it. “MacKenzie has a very clear sense of herself, and it was never going to change based on whether she was rich or poor,” says Hillis. “They’d think it was wrong to raise kids who are isolated by their wealth.”

Few novelists like to admit how much their books reflect their true selves, especially if their characters happen to be flawed or ruinously self-destructive. In this, MacKenzie Bezos is no different. “My characters are based on people I know, but not in a direct way,” she claims. Some friends, however, saw parts of her in Luther Albright, the main character of her first novel—a middle-aged father whose inability to express his inner life nearly destroys his family. “She’s not Luther,” emphasizes Alexa Albert, a Seattle psychiatrist and close family friend, “but, like him, she is deeply psychological and really wants her children to feel respected as individuals.”

“Luther,” Hillis theorizes, “is a book about someone who’s always trying to figure people out, but he gets it completely wrong. MacKenzie is always trying to understand people so she can help them shine.” Both friends point to the elaborate parties she throws for minor holidays like Mother’s Day, or a Day of the Dead celebration where guests must bring a dish that reminds them of someone who has passed away. “You end up feeling so connected to everyone there,” says Hillis.

“Overthinking” is something that brainy, sensitive women who’ve spent much of their lives immersed in fiction often get accused of, and Bezos is well aware of her tendencies in that direction. “I am a better person when I am writing,” she says, “and I’m probably a better mother because I can focus all that laser attention on these characters instead of worrying about my kids.” Her husband agrees. “Writing makes her really happy,” he says. The days she gets up early to write are always good ones in the Bezos household. “By the time I come down,” he says, “she’ll be literally dancing in the kitchen, which the kids and I love.”

Famous last names can be both a blessing and a burden. Amazon has faced criticism from the publishing world for pricing books so low that small, independent bookstores have been nearly wiped out. Now the wife of its CEO has written exactly the kind of literary book that would benefit from the word-of-mouth buzz those bookstores generate. What’s more, the couple themselves are exactly the kind of people who enjoy reading those books: Cormac McCarthy is one of Jeff Bezos’s favorite authors; MacKenzie’s include Anne Tyler, Jane Smiley, and Kazuo Ishiguro. I bring up this sensitive topic when Bezos and I areIn her minivan, she moved in and out of rush-hour traffic. I wondered if she ever thought about the unintended consequences of Amazon’s move into bookselling. “Not at all,” she replied, always the loyal wife. “I think Amazon has been great for readers.” To appease its critics or simply to have a stake in the game, Amazon recently launched its own publishing imprint. MacKenzie Bezos is not one of its authors. When I asked Bezos about his wife’s choice to publish elsewhere, he laughed. “We call her the one that got away,” he said.

Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of frequently asked questions about the article From the Archives MacKenzie Bezos Writer Mother of Four and HighProfile Wife written in a natural tone with clear concise answers

General Background Questions

Q What is this From the Archives article about
A Its a profile of MacKenzie Bezos from before her divorce from Jeff Bezos It focuses on her life as a novelist her role as a mother of four and how she handled being married to the worlds richest man

Q Why is it called From the Archives
A This usually means the article was originally published years ago and is being republished Its likely from around 2013 when the interview originally took place and is being resurfaced to give readers a look at her life before she became a billionaire philanthropist

Q Is MacKenzie Bezos a writer
A Yes She is a novelist She published her first book The Testing of Luther Albright in 2005 and a second novel Traps in 2013 She studied creative writing under Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison at Princeton

Q Who is the highprofile wife in the title
A It refers to her being the wife of Jeff Bezos the founder of Amazon At the time the article was written she was known primarily for her marriage not her own wealth or philanthropy

Q Does this article talk about her divorce from Jeff Bezos
A No The article was written years before their divorce was announced in 2019 It captures a moment in time when they were still married and living in Seattle

Content Perspective Questions

Q What is the main focus of the interview in the article
A The main focus is on how she balances her identity as a serious writer with her domestic life She talks about her writing routine her family and how she carves out time for her craft amidst the demands of motherhood

Q How does MacKenzie describe her writing routine