Author of the week: Jenny Sanford

(Image credit: THEWEEK)

last updated 8 January 2015

Jenny Sanford’s new memoir is undercutting her own brand, said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. A year ago, the wife of philandering South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford could rightly be called “a new model for the wronged political spouse.” A smart, self-assured former Wall Street executive, she seemed neither sorry victim nor blameworthy enabler when her husband embarrassed himself by publicly announcing that he had found his “soul mate” in an Argentine mistress. But in her thoughtful memoir, Staying True, Sanford reveals that she was an enabler extraordinaire. She apparently didn’t even blink when Mark asked to remove from their wedding vows the pledge to be faithful! “At the time,” she writes, “I thought his honesty was brave and sweet.”

“Revenge is a barely revealed subtext” of the new book, said Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. Despite the author’s attempts to convey empathy, the Mark Sanford she describes is “self-absorbed, pathologically cheap, and 360-degrees weird.” She wrote Staying True, she says, to let readers know she still believes that “giving and doing more for our marriage than I received in return” was the right thing to do for the couple’s four children. But could it be she’s obscuring her own personal ambition? She’s starting her new life by sitting for a Barbara Walters interview and publishing a book “tailor-made for the lucrative evangelical speaking circuit.” That’s “not a bad launch” for her new life as a public figure.