I was riveted to Oprah’s interview yesterday with Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of the philandering former U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards.
First of all, the passages Oprah read from Edwards’s new book Resilience, apparently written without a ghostwriter, showed a flair for beautiful, engaging prose. That was unexpected.
What didn’t surprise me at all, though, was Mrs. Edwards the person. Living with terminal cancer, not knowing if she has a year or ten years to live, she held up her reputation as a woman to admire. She was so engaging a defender of her marriage that she convinced even an unforgiving gal like me: No matter how horrible her husband’s lies and deceptions, their life together, their 30-year bond, was worth saving.
Mrs. Edwards was physically ill when her husband confessed a dalliance to her, she revealed to Oprah. She was enraged with him, even more so 18 months later when he admitted he lied about the duration of his infidelity. But it was when she said she wanted to “protect him” that I understood. That’s what we do for the people we love.
There was only one condition for the interview: The name of Rielle Hunter, John Edwards’s mistress and allegedly the mother of his child, would not be spoken. Instead, Mrs. Edwards used the words “that person” or “this woman” so that Hunter, who has been described as a fame-seeker of shameless proportions, would not get any more notoriety from the affair. And rightly so.
Oprah asked excellent questions; Mrs. Edwards was calm but direct, peaking in intensity only once when she said “You can’t just knock on the door, say ‘You’re out, I’m in. How ’bout your husband, honey?’… There’s no excuse for women to do this.”
Meanwhile her husband squirmed away from the camera only to have Oprah grab him in his expansive home gymnasium to ask about the solidity of their marriage. Replying with some uncertainty, he looked like we women wanted him to look: entirely uncomfortable, wholly ashamed and very much aware that his own actions had brought him to that point no person wants to experience. Were it not for the devotion and compassion of his wife, the Edwards marriage and family would have crumbled alongside his once-shining career.
