0 comment Tuesday, June 24, 2014 | admin

When Oprah's magazine came last week, I flipped to the Elizabeth Edwards interview immediately. Why was she thrusting herself back into the limelight, zig-zagging the talk-show circuit to pour more salt on her wounds? Reminding everyone that when she asked them to support her husband for president -- with their money and their time -- she knew full well he'd had an affair that could derail him.
Everything about this media tour was peculiar.

"We're not fancy people," she tells Oprah as they squish into a sofa in her 28,000-square-foot house. "All we need is a comfortable place to sit and have a conversation."

His announcement, as we all know now, was virtually contemporaneous with his confession to Elizabeth that "there had been a night."

But even with her cancer, his infidelity, and the death of a son, their magnificent home softens the blows. She tells Oprah, "it's hard to sit in this house -- even with the things I face -- and think, Boy, my life really stinks."

She recounts the beginning of John's affair in excruciating detail, all the way down to the "pick-up" line Ms. Hunter allegedly used to seduce him. "And then he went to dinner at a nearby restaurant, and when he walked back, she was standing in front of the hotel and said to him, 'You are so hot.'"
And she wanted to know every detail, she tells Oprah. "I'm a puzzle doer. I had some pieces of the puzzle, and I felt it was going to make sense if I had all the pieces."
Yet, when Oprah asks Elizabeth exactly what John told her ("December 30 he comes and he tells you he's had this indiscretion. Did he use the word indiscretion?"), Elizabeth is foggy. "You'd think I'd remember, but it's sort of a fuzz."

In perhaps her biggest non sequitur, she says John loves her, she's decided to forgive him, and she's giving him a chance to earn back her trust. "If I had led an absolutely brainless life, I suppose I would find that harder to do." What?

Yes, she does have cancer and it's awful, it really is; she doesn't even know how much time she has left. But how she chooses to spend her time is baffling. "Should I be organizing the costume closet right now . . . or can that wait?"

I cannot relate.



And here, another brilliant dodge. "Have you asked him if it is his child?" Oprah asks. "He's talked to me about questions people ask. He doesn't know any more than I know," says a slippery Elizabeth.



Her explanation for why is she doing this is hardly satisfying.
She says when she first found out about the affair, she wanted to back out of writing the book. "But then you start to think, Am I going to say I can't do these things, or am I going to take my life back? So although it was hard and in some ways painful to write, it was a statement that I own my own experiences. Nobody else has control of them."
So this is about control? Okay. But what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

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