First published 2013
Rielle Hunter sits with her original memoir and a red pen. She cannot change what she wrote when anger and hurt clouded her judgment. She cannot erase the words that now make her cringe. Instead, she adds notes throughout the text. Each annotation marks a moment where she failed to see her own responsibility. Hunter had justified her affair with married politician John Edwards by casting herself as the victim of media attacks and personal betrayals. The original book reflected this defensive stance. Now she recognizes a harder truth. She behaved badly, and no amount of external cruelty changes that fact. The revised edition preserves every original word while layering in this painful new awareness. Hunter refuses to hide her mistakes behind revised prose. She owns them instead, creating a document that captures both her initial blindness and her eventual reckoning with the damage she caused.
Genres: autobiography, memoir, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: ownership-of-mistakes, unreliable-narrator
258 pages · Kindle Edition · BenBella Books