Elizabeth Edwards: not perfect.

I honestly hadn’t given Elizabeth Edwards much thought.  I see her as a strong woman, who’s life has taken some very public unexpected turns.
Then I start seeing the media surrounding her new book.

Maureen Dowd:  But it’s just a gratuitous peek into their lives, and one that exposes her kids, by peddling more dregs about their personal family life in a book, and exposes the ex-girlfriend who’s now trying to raise the baby girl, a dead ringer for John Edwards, in South Orange, N.J.

Kathleen Parker:   Among modern sacrileges, those topping the list include: (1) visiting Mexico’s Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine and asking, “Who painted it?” Or, slightly worse, (2) questioning Elizabeth Edwards’ motives.

The Huffington Post and Connie Schultz were a bit more kind.

Caryl Rivers put it simply:

Elizabeth Edwards has taken hold of the one power she has left–being able to tell her own story. She’s not thinking of her husband or her children or the other woman or the other woman’s child. She’s claiming something for herself. Judge her if you will–for being too trusting, too ambitious, too willing to serve her husband’s ambition, too smart, too angry, whatever.

But let her have her say.

Connie Shultz :

Edwards has invited criticism by writing this book, and some of it is earned. While she admits to being devastated by her husband’s infidelity, she absolves him of responsibility for his choices, depicting him instead as vulnerable to a predator’s wiles. She also fails to acknowledge that she let so many down when she continued to campaign on her husband’s character after finding out about his affair.

What is troubling about many of the attacks, though, is their focus on her willingness to speak publicly about her pain. What writers like Dowd, Parker and Traister fail to acknowledge, and perhaps never have had to consider, is the easy privilege of their own outspoken lives.

Maybe that’s why I cut Edwards a wider swath. I met her once in 2007, only days after she announced that her cancer had metastasized and was terminal. I don’t know her, but I do know something about her world.

I’m married to U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, and so I know how it feels when someone tries to refract everything you do or say through the lens of your marriage. I wrote a book about Sherrod’s 2006 Senate race, with his blessing. But some argued that this wife, this writer, had no business telling her tale. The campaign had been a rewarding but difficult year for both of us, but those who cared only about the candidate thought a candid account of my experience was inappropriate, if not irrelevant.

To me, the only irrelevance was their definition of wifely duty.

The similarities between Edwards and me end there, but not my empathy. She has something to say and an audience that wants to listen. That should be enough, but there’s more to her story and it is her story to tell.

What we seldom hear in the uproar over the book is her persistent theme that, for her, time is running out. She does not know, she writes, what to do with talk of anything happening more than a year away.

So what are your thoughts?  Is Elizabeth doing more harm than good in publishing this book?  Or is her story one that needs to be heard?