Nikki Haley has written three books. Here are five takeaways.

If you plan to run for president, they say, write a book. Nikki Haley has written three.

The first book, “Can't Is Not an Option” (Sentinel, 2012), describes her upbringing in Bamberg, SC, as one of four children in the only Indian-American family in town. It also chronicles her ascent in politics, from a little-known state legislator to the first woman and first person of color to serve as governor of South Carolina.

She published her second, “With All Due Respect” (St. Martin's Press), in 2019 after leaving her post as ambassador to the United Nations in President Donald J. Trump's administration. The 272-page memoir, released in a media blitz in which she repeated the White House talking points against Trump's first impeachment and defended his character, follows her transformation from governor to diplomat. And her 2022 collection of essays, “If You Want Something Done” (St. Martin's Press), whose title comes from a line from Margaret Thatcher that she deployed on the national debate stage, chronicles the lives of trailblazing women.

Like all memoirs, Ms. Haley's books tell a carefully crafted story, skipping over controversies that would portray her in a less positive light. Here are a few things we learned from them.

Her Indian-born parents had a comfortable upbringing.

Ms. Haley often says she was born and raised in a rural town of 2,500 people and two traffic lights, but she says little about her heritage during the campaign.

Her mother and father, Raj and Ajit Randhawa, are from the Punjab region of India and left a life of prosperity and comfort to come to the United States.

Ms. Randhawa, who lost her own father at a young age, grew up “in a six-story house in the shadow of the Golden Temple, the holiest site of the Sikh religion, to which she belongs,” Ms. Haley writes in “Can't is not an option.” Ms. Haley's mother had chaperones for her every need, including dragging her books to class, and earned a law degree when many Indian girls were dropping out of high school.

The son of an officer in the British colonial army, Mr Randhawa was raised by his uncle due to his father's frequent movements around India. He is also Sikh and highly educated: he received his PhD from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and became a biology professor at Voorhees College, a historically black school in Denmark, S.C.

She knew how to deal with 'the boys' from the start.

When Ms. Haley got her first job out of college in 1994 as an accounting supervisor for a recycling company and five of its subsidiaries, she walked into her first board meeting to find “a conference table full of men,” she wrote in “ Not being able to do is no option.”

She was an executive—the first female executive the company had hired—but that didn't stop one of her coworkers from asking her to get someone else a cup of coffee. Stunned, she picked up the phone and called her secretary.

“'Pam,' I said, 'could you please get Paul a cup of coffee?'” she wrote, adding that her response was “instinctive” and “good.”

The movement of power silenced the others in the room for a moment, she remembered.

“From that moment on, my colleagues treated me as an equal,” she says.

The anecdote foreshadowed her instincts and assertiveness as a politician – and her poise when her gender sets her apart. During the presidential campaign, she often calls her rivals, all men, “the boys,” especially when she tries to deflect their attacks on her.

Her identity is a strength and a shield.

Ms. Haley has drawn criticism for downplaying the role of racism in the country's history while campaigning for a largely white Republican base. She has insisted that the United States has “never been a racist country” and initially failed to mention slavery when a voter asked her about the causes of the Civil War.

But her first two books make it clear that Ms. Haley is intimately familiar with prejudice, having experienced racism and sexism in Bamberg and beyond.

As children, she and her older sister competed in the Little Miss Bamberg pageant, but were disqualified because the judges had historically named only one white winner and one black winner, and they were neither. (Her comfort gift was a beach ball.)

In restaurants and stores, she recalled, customers sometimes stared or whispered and pointed at her father, who wore a turban and, unlike many Sikh men in the United States, did not cut his hair. During a road trip to Columbia, SC, the owners of a fruit stand reported her father to the police. “We got back into the car in silence,” she wrote in “With All Due Respect.”

And when she first ran for office, top consultants assessed her attractiveness during her bid for state legislature and wondered whether a 31-year-old woman — and an Indian American at that — could be a viable candidate. While she was lagging in fundraising and trailing in the polls, she was also bombarded with ugly, racist attacks.

Those experiences formed the basis for her attempts at persuasion lawmakers to take down the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina Statehouse in 2015 after a white supremacist shot and killed nine Black parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.

But she also used her family's immigration story to soften criticism as she supported tough immigration laws, pushed back on pleas from Black lawmakers to diversify her government and highlighted the country's progress from past racial struggles .

“I passed that same fruit stand traveling in and out of Columbia when I was an adult and in government,” she wrote in “With All Due Respect.” 'Every time I thought of my father's pain and shame. But more importantly, I realized that the same thing would never happen again today. South Carolina is a different place. My story is proof of that.”

She has always been careful with Donald Trump.

Ms. Haley supported Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, during the 2016 presidential primaries. Trump's rhetoric turned her off, she wrote in “With All Due Respect,” even as her own mother became a Trump supporter and the Republican Party clearly seemed to go further to the right.

Trump's tone and language during the 2016 election “took me back to the Mother Emanuel murders,” she wrote.

“Trump touched nerves,” she added. “The more he did that, the more I feared that a disturbed person would respond with violence.”

But she eventually found out about Mr. Trump.

Their relationship goes back years. When Ms. Haley first won the Republican nomination for South Carolina governor in 2010, Trump sent her “a campaign contribution in a gold-adorned envelope,” she wrote in “With All Respect.”

Ms. Haley described her stint as U.N. ambassador and suggested that Mr. Trump sometimes changed course based on her advice. (Interviews with more than a dozen former senior government officials suggest she carefully weighed her fight.)

Sometimes she praised Mr. Trump and didn't criticize him. But she did fire at two members of his administration who had fallen out of his favor and with whom she had clashed: John F. Kelly, the former chief of staff, and Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state.

Yes, she gave her husband a new name.

Ms. Haley met Bill Haley while she was a student at Clemson University in South Carolina and he was a student at nearby Anderson University. He was born in Ohio and raised in a foster home and knew how to make her laugh. The two hit it off and eventually started dating. Then she asked him what his full name was, she wrote in “Can't Is Not an Option.”

“William Michael,” he told her. But Mr. Haley looked more like a Michael, she wrote, and from then on she and all her friends started calling him that.

“When he transferred to Clemson his sophomore year, my friends became his friends, and before we knew it, he was widely known as Michael,” she said.