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    Elizabeth Edwards Talks and Talks

    Posted Thursday, April 30, 2009 4:18 PM | By Hanna Rosin
    Willa, you question whether Elizabeth Edwards should have written a tell-all about her husband's affair. In my experience covering her during the campaign, she is, in her bones, a tell-all kind of person. In her books, in her speeches, in her blog posts, she reveals an extraordinary amount of personal information for a political wife—exactly what she did after her son was killed, where John touched her when they discovered her cancer had returned, how she yells at her kids. That is, however, not exactly the same as being honest. I've always thought of her as a model of Lionel Trilling's concept of "authenticity." What's most important to her is being true to herself at any given moment. If she is angry at her staff she will yell at them. If she hates John she will kick him out of the house. If the next minute she feels love for him, she'll feel it. Authenticity requires no consistency. So in her book I imagine she is heartbroken one minute and vengeful the next (such as when she calls Rielle, the mistress, "pathetic.") John, on the other hand, veers more towards Trilling's concept of "sincerity." He conforms himself to an external standard of moral uprightness and honorable behavior. Not a hair out of place, not a word changes in his stump speech; it's always consistent and polished. This is an outdated model, which is why I think he always seemed so insincere when he was trying to be sincere. Also, as we all know, he fell badly short of it.
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