Curtis Sittenfeld - American Wife

“Hank.” I wait until he’s looking at me directly. “I don’t ooze sincerity. I

am

sincere.”

Hank’s smirk is slow and closed-lipped. “It’s your Achilles’ heel,” he says.

____

THE PART ABOUT

being famous that nobody who hasn’t been famous can understand is the criticism. Sure, sticks and stones and all of that, but the fact is that many people have probably wished at least once or twice that someone would be completely honest with them. How does this dress or this haircut really look? What do you truly think of my wife or my son, the house I built, the memo I wrote, the cake I baked?

In reality, they don’t want to know. What they want is to be complimented and for the compliments to be completely honest; they want all-encompassing affirmation that’s also true. That isn’t how unvarnished opinions work. People’s unvarnished opinions are devastating, or they are at first. As one of my predecessors, Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote, “Every woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.”

There are two ways of being criticized: neutrally and intentionally. The neutral criticism comes, for example, in an ostensibly objective article, in a throwaway line:

Mrs. Blackwell, who has never been known for her fashion acumen

. . .

Asked about her husband’s low approval ratings, Alice Blackwell stiffens and becomes defensive

. . .

Though insiders claim she has a sense of humor, Alice Blackwell rarely shows it in public . . . Unlike the first couple before them, who were warm and frequent hosts . . .

You have spent an hour in the presence of a reporter, you were guarded, especially at first, but you got along perfectly well and shared a few laughs (yes, laughs, in spite of your alleged humorlessness), you thought the interview went well, and then—this? The neutral criticisms sting more because of how casual they are; although they aren’t necessarily the truth, they feel like it, like the reporter isn’t

trying

to be mean but is simply stating facts.

And then there are the outright attacks, which appear mostly on cable television or blogs; in the case of blogs, they are vehement in ways that evoke spittle and flushed faces and the pounding of keyboards:

What a traitor to feminism . . . How much Valium do you think she has to take to forget she’s married to the Antichrist? . . . OH MY GOD she’s SUCH a Stepford wife!!!

Once or twice a year, I type my name into an Internet search engine—I don’t want to be overly sheltered from what’s out there—and skimming the results makes me feel as if someone is turning a doorknob inside my stomach; each time I’ve done it, I’ve thought afterward that it was a mistake, and then enough time has passed that I’ve forgotten. To be lambasted by strangers is not only painful but so pronounced a reversal of the usual social code that it’s also quite astonishing. Unfamous people imagine that famous people are endlessly pleased with themselves and their exposure, and I suppose some are, but far from all. These online rants also feel, in a different way, deceptively like the truth, unguarded and without the filters of the main-stream media. Although my critics are in the minority, how can I listen to praise when the faultfinders are so aggressive, so aggrieved, and so certain?

In addition, there are vast quantities of distorted or flat-out wrong information, motives or emotions that are incorrectly ascribed: about Andrew Imhof’s death (

Isn’t it lucky Alice Blackwell was white and rich and didn’t have to go to prison after murdering her boyfriend?

), about my supposed Christian evangelism (a cartoon ran in many newspapers of me reading the Bible to a group of Muslim children, saying, “Now, now, boys and girls, if you just pray to Jesus Christ, everything will be all right”), about my supposed intellectual superiority in comparison to Charlie (another cartoon: Charlie and I are lying in bed at night, and I am absorbed in

War and Peace,

while he pages through

The Cat in the Hat

). One year Jadey sent me a birthday card—apparently, a popular one—which had a smiling photo of me in which I wore a navy suit and an eagle pin. (I was never very fond of that pin, but it had been given to me by the wife of Charlie’s secretary of defense, and I felt obligated to wear it a few times.) On the front of the card, it said,

Some things are worse than another birthday . . .

and inside, it said,

You could be married to HIM

. Underneath, Jadey had scrawled,

Don’t be offended, also don’t show c!

Some of the misinformation out there about us, about me, is more factual and insignificant—how old I was when Charlie and I got married, the spelling of my childhood neighbor Mrs. Falke’s last name—but no matter the tone or type of error, it is very rarely worth it to have my press secretary request a correction. I also must accept that some errors have been propagated by Charlie’s inner circle, specifically by Hank: that I am the daughter of a postal carrier was a widespread one during the first presidential campaign. (It is a great irony that my middle-class roots have proved, from a political standpoint, to be my most valuable asset. The whiffs of East Coast Ivy League dynastic privilege that cling to Charlie—I dispel them with my humble Wisconsin authenticity.)

Even as my approval ratings have remained high, a public idea of me has formed that has little relationship to who I am, what I think, or even how I spend my time. Hank once commissioned a poll that found the majority of Americans believe I’m a devout Christian who has never held a paying job. Perhaps this is

why

my approval ratings have remained high.

I don’t imagine any person could remain entirely impervious to her own public distortion, and I won’t claim it doesn’t bother me, but I made a decision in Charlie’s first gubernatorial campaign not to devote my energy to correcting misinterpretations. A press secretary had arranged for a reporter from the

Sentinel

to come for tea with me at home (how I hated having reporters in our house, knowing they were scrutinizing our family pictures, our magazines and knickknacks and refrigerator magnets, when we’d never meant for them to be scrutinized, we’d only acquired them in the course of living—it was easier after we moved to the governor’s mansion and then to the White House, because I always knew that if the reporters were interlopers, so were we). During this

Sentinel

interview, the reporter asked me about gardening, baking, and children’s books; I provided my tips for growing delphiniums, my recipe for molasses cookies, and a list of my favorite titles, starting with

The Giving Tree.

Despite the family she married into, Alice Blackwell is avowedly apolitical,

the article began.

Social security and health care? No thanks, she’d rather talk about how she gets her molasses cookies so darn chewy . . .

I was mortified; Charlie thought it was hilarious; and Hank was thrilled by the article, in large part because Charlie’s Democratic opponent, the incumbent, had recently divorced his wife of thirty-three years, married a suspiciously attractive and much younger lobbyist, and couldn’t hope to compete with our sugary domesticity. For a twenty-four-hour period after the article ran, I was tense and jumpy, continuously composing letters to the editor in my head. I had gone for a walk alone—we no longer belonged to the Maronee Country Club, Charlie had had to resign given the awkward fact of the club having no black members, and so now, if I wasn’t with Jadey, I walked along our street—and all at once, a notion lodged itself in my head, a notion I’ve come back to again and again in the years since: Although Charlie was running for office, I was not. The fact that I was represented in an article in a particular way made it neither true nor untrue; the way I lived my life, the way I conducted myself, wasn’t just the only truth but also the only reality I could control. I wouldn’t stretch or stoop to accommodate the media, I decided. I would be accountable to myself, and I would always know whether I’d met or fallen short of my own expectations. How much distress I’d avoid this way, how much calmer I would feel. Since that afternoon, I have always tried to be polite with members of the media, though I realize I haven’t always been forthcoming in the way they’d like. I attempt to express myself as simply as possible, I respond to what they ask rather than promoting my own particular interests, I don’t share personal details or vulnerabilities. When I met Charlie, I fell for him, I say, because he was fun; when Andrew Imhof died, I say, it was incredibly sad; and when I think about the troops, I say, I am concerned for them and admire their bravery and sacrifice. I don’t bend over backward to convince reporters that everything I say is heartfelt (after all, they don’t determine whether it’s heartfelt) or to proffer clever sound bites; I don’t disparage Charlie’s opponents. That I’m not particularly quotable and am often a bit dull, optimistically dull, I consider a minor victory.