It wasn’t until later, when I reread the letter, that I understood why Donald thought it would be a good idea to hire me—not because it was “fantastic” but because it demonstrated that I was really good at making other people look really good.

A few days later, I was given my own desk in the back office of the Trump Organization. A nondescript, open space with drop ceilings, fluorescent lighting, and huge steel filing cabinets lining the walls, it had a lot more in common with the utilitarian office of Trump Management on Avenue Z than the gold-and-glass walls lined with magazine covers featuring Donald’s face that greeted guests out front.

I spent the first week on the job familiarizing myself with the people who worked there and the filing system. (To my surprise, there was a folder with my name on it containing a single sheet of paper—a handwritten letter I had sent to Donald my junior year in high school. I’d asked if he could get me a pair of tickets to a Rolling Stones concert. He couldn’t.) I kept to myself for the most part, but whenever I had a question, Ernie East, one of Donald’s vice presidents and a very nice man, helped me out. He suggested documents that might be useful, and on occasion he’d put some file folders on my desk that he thought might help. The problem was that I didn’t really know what the book was supposed to be about beyond its broad theme, which I cleverly deduced from its working title, The Art of the Comeback.

I hadn’t read either of Donald’s other two books, but I knew a bit about them. The Art of the Deal, as far as I understood it, had been meant to present Donald as a serious real estate developer. The book’s ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, had done a good job—which he has long since regretted—of making his subject sound coherent, as if Donald had actually espoused a fully realized business philosophy that he understood and lived by.

After the embarrassment of the poorly timed publication of Surviving at the Top, I assumed that Donald wanted a return to the relative seriousness of its predecessor. I set about trying to explain how, under the most adverse circumstances, he had emerged from the depths, victorious and more successful than he had ever been. There wasn’t much evidence to support that narrative—he was about to experience his fourth bankruptcy filing with the Plaza Hotel—but I had to try.

Every morning on the way to my desk, I stopped by to see Donald in the hope that he’d have time to sit down with me for an interview. I figured that would be the best way to find out what he had done and how he had done it. His perspective was everything, and I needed the stories in his own words. He was usually on a call, which he’d put on speaker as soon as I sat down. The calls, as far as I could tell, were almost never about business. The person on the other end, who had no idea he or she was on speaker, was looking for gossip or for Donald’s opinion about women or a new club that had opened. Sometimes he was being asked for a favor. Often the conversation was about golf. Whenever anything outrageously sycophantic, salacious, or stupid was said, Donald smirked and pointed to the speakerphone as if to say, “What an idiot.”

When he wasn’t on a call, I’d find him going through the newspaper clippings that were collected for him daily. Every article was about him or at least mentioned him. He showed them to me, something he did with most visitors. Depending on the content of the article, he sometimes wrote on it with a blue Flair felt-tip marker, just like the one my grandfather used, and sent it back to the reporter. After he finished writing, he’d hold up the clipping and ask for my opinion of what he considered his witty remarks. That did not help me with my research.

A few weeks after Donald hired me, I still hadn’t gotten paid. When I brought it up to him, he pretended at first not to understand what I was talking about. I pointed out that I needed an advance so I could at least buy a computer and a printer—I was still writing on the same electric typewriter I’d bought with Gam’s help in grad school. He said he thought that was the publisher’s problem. “Can you talk to Random House?”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Donald’s editor had no idea he’d hired me.

One night, as I sat at home trying to figure out how to piece together something vaguely interesting out of the uninteresting documents I’d been poring over, Donald called. “When you come to the office tomorrow, Rhona’s going to have some pages for you. I’ve been working on material for the book. It’s really good.” He sounded excited.

Finally I might have something to work with, some idea about how to organize this thing. I still didn’t know what he thought about his “comeback,” how he ran his business, or even what role he played in the deals he was currently developing.

The next day, Rhona handed me a manila envelope containing about ten typewritten pages, as promised. I took it to my desk and began to read. When I finished, I wasn’t sure what to think. It was clearly a transcript of a recording Donald had made, which explained its stream-of-consciousness quality. It was an aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest, and fattest slobs he’d ever met. The biggest takeaways were that Madonna chewed gum in a way Donald found unattractive and that Katarina Witt, a German Olympic figure skater who had won two gold medals and four world championships, had big calves.

I stopped asking him for an interview.

From time to time, Donald asked about my mother. He hadn’t seen her in four years, ever since Ivana and Blaine had given Gam an ultimatum just before Thanksgiving: either Linda came to the House for the holidays, or they did. They found their not-exactly sister-in-law too quiet and depressed, and they just couldn’t have a good time with her there. My mother had been in the Trump family since 1961, and though I never understood why my grandfather required her presence at holidays after my parents divorced, she always went. More than twenty-five years later, my grandmother chose Ivana and Blaine, without factoring in how the decision might affect me and my brother.

Now Donald said, “I think we made a big mistake continuing to support your mother. It might have been better if we’d cut her off after a couple of years and she had to stand on her own two feet.”

The idea that anyone else was entitled to money or support he or she wasn’t obviously earning was impossible for Donald and my grandfather to fathom. Nothing my mother had received as the former wife of the oldest son of a very wealthy family, who had raised two of Fred and Mary Trump’s grandchildren almost single-handedly, had come from my grandfather, and it certainly hadn’t come from Donald, yet they both acted as if it did.

Donald probably thought he was being kind. There used to be a spark of that in him. He did once give me $100 to get my car out of impound. And after my father died, Donald was the only member of my family, other than my grandmother, who included me in anything. But his kindness had become so warped over time—through lack of use and Fred’s discouragement—that what he considered kindness would have been practically unrecognizable to the rest of us. I didn’t know it at the time, but when we had that conversation, Donald was still receiving his $450,000 allowance from the banks every month.

One morning as I sat across from Donald at his desk going over the details of our trip to Mar-a-Lago (Donald thought it would help me with the book if I saw his Palm Beach mansion firsthand) the phone rang. It was Philip Johnson.

As they chatted, Donald suddenly seemed to get an idea. He put the phone on speaker. “Philip!” he said. “You have to talk to my niece. She’s writing my next book. You can tell her all about the Taj.”

I introduced myself, and Philip suggested I come to his house in Connecticut the following week to discuss the book.

After Donald finished the call, he said to me, “That’ll be fantastic. Philip is a great guy. I hired him to design the porta-co-share for the Taj Mahal. It’s tremendous—I’d never seen anything like it.”

After we finished discussing the logistics of our trip to Florida, I left the office and headed to the library. I had no idea who Philip Johnson was, and I’d never heard of a “porta-co-share.”

In the limo on the way to the airport the following day, I told Donald that I’d arranged to meet Johnson at his home, which I’d learned at the library was the very famous Glass House that he, a very famous architect, had designed. I had also discovered that the thing Johnson had designed for the Taj—what Donald called a porta-co-share—was a porte cochere, basically a large carport. I understood why Donald had wanted Johnson to be involved in the project; he wasn’t just famous, he also traveled in the kind of circles Donald aspired to. I didn’t, however, understand why Johnson would bother designing the Taj’s carport. It was a very small-scale project that seemed not worth his while.

When Donald picked up a copy of the New York Post less than ten minutes into the car ride, I knew he had no intention of giving me information for the book. I’d begun to suspect that he’d hired me without consulting his publisher because he didn’t want to be micromanaged by the people there. It would also be a lot easier to put off his niece, who wasn’t under contract and was barely getting paid, than a professional writer, who would most likely have a significant stake in the success of the book. But we were about to be trapped together on a plane for two hours, so I hoped he might talk to me then.

When we got into the cabin of the jet that was waiting for us on the tarmac, Donald spread out his arms and asked, “So what do you think?”

“It’s great, Donald.” I knew the drill.

As soon as we reached cruising altitude and we could unbuckle our seat belts, one of his bodyguards handed him a huge stack of mail after setting a glass of Diet Coke next to him. I watched as he opened one envelope after another, then, after examining the contents for a few seconds, threw them and the envelope onto the floor. When a large pile accumulated, the same guy would reappear, pick up the wastepaper, and throw it into the garbage. That happened over and over again. I moved to another seat so I didn’t have to watch.

The staff were waiting as the car pulled up to the entrance at Mar-a-Lago. Donald went off with his butler, and I introduced myself to everybody else. The fifty-eight-bedroom mansion with thirty-three bathrooms outfitted with fixtures plated in gold and an eighteen-hundred-square-foot living room that sported forty-two-foot ceilings was as garish and uncomfortable as I’d expected.

Dinner that evening was just me, Donald, and Marla. She and I had met a few times before, but we had never had a chance to get to know each other one on one. I found her friendly, and Donald seemed relaxed with her. She was just two years older than I was and about as different from Ivana as a human being could be. Marla was down to earth and soft spoken where Ivana was all flash, arrogance, and spite.

The next day, I spent the morning exploring the property. There were no other guests, so the entire place felt empty and strangely quiet. I talked to the butler to see if he had any interesting stories, got to know some of the other guys who worked there, and then took a quick swim before lunch, which was scheduled for 1:00 p.m. As formal as Mar-a-Lago was in some ways, it was also much more casual than our usual family gathering places, so I felt comfortable wearing a bathing suit and a pair of shorts to lunch, which was being served on the patio.

Donald, who was wearing golf clothes, looked up at me as I approached as if he’d never really seen me before. “Holy shit, Mary. You’re stacked.”

“Donald!” Marla said in mock horror, slapping him lightly on the arm.

I was twenty-nine and not easily embarrassed, but my face reddened, and I suddenly felt self-conscious. I pulled my towel around my shoulders. It occurred to me that nobody in my family, outside of my parents and brother, had ever seen me in a bathing suit. Unfortunately for the book, that was about the only interesting thing that happened during my entire visit to Palm Beach.

Back in New York, Donald finally got sick of my asking him to sit for an interview and handed me a list of names. “Talk to these people.” Included were the presidents of his casinos and Maryanne’s husband, John. Although that was potentially helpful, he didn’t seem to understand that writing the book without any input from him would be close to impossible.

I met with all the presidents of the casinos. Not surprisingly, a lot of their answers were canned, and I realized that they weren’t going to give me dirt on what was happening in their boss’s business at the height of the chaos and dysfunction. The trips weren’t a total waste of time; I’d never been down there before, and at least I got a sense of the place.

My meeting with John Barry was even less productive than the trips to Atlantic City.

“What can you tell me?” I asked him.

He rolled his eyes.

Finally Donald told me his editor wanted to meet with me. A lunch was set up, and I arrived at the restaurant thinking he and I were going to be discussing next steps. It was an expensive “in” place in Midtown, and we were seated at a small, cramped table near the kitchen.

With very little preliminary conversation, the editor told me that Random House wanted Donald to hire someone with more experience.

“I’ve been working on this for a while,” I said, “and I think I’ve made some progress. The problem is, I can’t get Donald to sit down with me for an interview.”

“You can’t expect to play a Mozart concerto the first time you sit down at a piano,” the editor said, as if I’d just learned the alphabet the day before.

“Donald told me he likes what I’ve done so far,” I said.

The editor looked at me as if I’d just proved his point for him. “Donald hasn’t read any of it,” he said.

I stopped at the office the next day to clear out my desk and hand over anything that might be useful to my eventual replacement. I wasn’t upset. I didn’t even mind that Donald had had somebody else fire me. The project had hit a wall. Besides, after all of the time I had spent in his office, I still had no idea what he actually did.