My March non-fiction work was the short book Staying True by Jenny Sanford, ex-wife of South Carolina's ex-governor. You know, the one who gave the phrase "hiking the Appalachian Trail" a whole new meaning.
My biggest question about Jenny is why a smart, successful woman would stay with a pathologically parsimonious man who apparently spent very little time with her over the years. I guess she was so involved with being mother to four children that she didn't realize that her relationship with her husband was more of a political partnership than an actual marriage.
I really lost it when she found out about Mark's extracurricular activities and didn't smite him with the clue phone. He would beg her for "permission" to go see his soul-mate to re-end it, having already ended it by phone and in person, and whine about how hard it was to be good all the time, and she just kept quoting the Bible at him and hoping he'd stop being an ass-hat.
I did like that she got a certain amount of gentle revenge by telling about his ridiculous cheapness, while mostly taking the high road. Of course, the problem with admitting that your husband is an ass-hat is that it leads to the question I've been asking, why did she hang around for so long to be Mrs. Ass-Hat?
I don't know. The only people who really understand a relationship are the people in the relationship. What looks like a dysfunctional mess from the outside can be propping up an awful lot of stuff. Why didn't Hilary leave Bill? She could have done so much better!
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