Library Journal - Audio
Hunter provides her side of the story of her sad, sordid love affair with former U.S. Senator from North Carolina and presidential contender John Edwards. At the time Hunter began her relationship with Edwards, she says, he was already involved with three other women outside his marriage. Hunter shares lesser-known details of the sleazy tale of Edwards's political suicide, beginning when she first met "Johnny," followed by more information than is necessary about their passionate trysts, how the affair escalated beyond heated infatuation into discussion of a possible long-term relationship, how she and Edwards had to adapt their lustful energies to accommodate the far-fetched Edwards presidential campaign, and how the tawdry affair eventually became public and Edwards began his ridiculous cover-up efforts. Also included are Hunter's surprising insights about Edwards's wife, Elizabeth, who died in 2010 of metastatic breast cancer. It was probably inevitable that Hunter would eventually release her side of this story; she rationalizes that she wants to make sure her daughter by Edwards understands "what really happened." VERDICT Audie Award-nominated and Earphones-winning narrator Cassandra Campbell's delivery is, unfortunately, marred by unnecessarily cheesy, adolescent voicing that makes this unfortunate story best suited to Jerry Springer fans and Oprah whoopers. [The BenBella hc was a New York Times best seller.—Ed.]—Dale Farris, Groves, TX
Kirkus Reviews
The proximate cause of John Edwards' political unraveling has a few scores to settle. Hunter occupied the center of the oddest sideshow of the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign: That summer, reports emerged that she had a child with the North Carolina senator, sparking months of denials (including a campaign staffer's false claim that he was the father). Hunter's clumsily written memoir is an extended exercise in blame assignment: Edwards' friends and campaign aides for being greedy, careerist, and manipulative; Edwards' wife for being a bully; and Edwards himself for being, as she told him at their first fateful meeting, "so hot!" To avoid furtive trysts as their affair deepened, she was hired to film Edwards' travels for online "webisodes." Hunter expresses an almost total disinterest in the politics she covered, and on the road, she rained contempt on nearly everybody surrounding the candidate. (In one instance, she recalls "some poverty woman who was really snotty to me.") Hunter reserves her deepest fury for Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, who's portrayed cartoonishly, forever screaming at her cowering husband. That Elizabeth's outrage might be justified by her husband's philandering seems to entirely escape Hunter, who rationalizes her status as a mistress by claiming that the Edwards' marriage was loveless and sexless. (Elizabeth's death from cancer in 2010 hardly softens her tone.) The flimsy prose, peppered with all-caps exclamations and high school-age sarcasm, grows even more tedious in the later chapters, as the author chronicles legalistic parrying over who paid how much to whom out of which accounts. The mood is lightened by photos of Hunter and Edwards with their daughter, Quinn, but a seething sense of superiority and entitlement persists. An object lesson in misguided tell-all writing: A woman hounded by the media while raising an infant fathered by a cheating man manages to render herself unsympathetic.
