Only A Mother Like Caitlin Flanagan Can Know What Real Love Is

It’s amazing what passes for a book review these days. Caitlin Flanagan’s review of Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon’s new biography of Cosmopolitan magazine founder Helen Gurley Brown, isn’t much of a review at all, but an excuse for Flanagan to rant–sometimes less than coherently–about the marital foibles of John Edwards and to turn his wife Elizabeth into a living saint. The review, in the September issue of the Atlantic, sticks the title of Elizabeth Edward’s book in with the Brown biography to justify Flanagan’s meanderings, but Edwards’ problems have nothing to do with Helen Gurley Brown and even less to do with Brown’s manifesto from 1962, Sex and the Single Girl. Flanagan sets out on the road to review and analysis until a quote of Brown’s sets off a hair-trigger and she’s gone, raving about the audacity of John Edwards to sleep with–and have fathered–the child of a woman who is not his wife. In Sex and the Single Girl, Helen Gurley Brown gave the girls in the steno pool permission to go after their married bosses, even advising them how, specifically, to do that. And the quote that sends Flanagan off the deep end is something Brown supposedly said in response to questions about any “moral qualms” she might have in encouraging single women to date married men. Brown announced, “I’m afraid I have a cavalier attitude about wives.”

Flanagan can’t allow that. She has been marriage’s champion since 2006, when her book about the joys of domesticity– To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife–was released. Last month in Time magazine she wrote about the affairs of South Carolina governor Mark Sanford and Senator John Ensign of Nevada, furious over what those affairs were doing to American Marriage. She wrote:

“And so two more American families discover a truth as old as marriage: a lasting covenant between a man and a woman can be a vehicle for the nurture and protection of each other, the one reliable shelter in an uncaring world — or it can be a matchless tool for the infliction of suffering on the people you supposedly love above all others, most of all on your children.” (Fearing most readers at that point might be bored, Time posted this teaser beneath that paragraph online: See the top 10 mistresses. Hmm… let’s flip to that one….)

Flanagan raises the red flag on divorce and how harmful it is for children and quotes sociologists that support her view. She writes:

“Poignantly, the one thing that unites the poor and the middle class in their hopes for family life is the imperishable dream of being married forever, grabbing hold of the golden ring of lasting partnership.”

In the Atlantic rant-disguised-as-book-review, Flanagan attacks John Edwards as if she knows the Edwardses well, and feels so personally hurt by John Edwards’ embarrassing behavior that she must avenge his wife’s good name. So badly does she want to us to believe she’s a huge fan of Elizabeth Edwards that Flanagan writes:“I’ve had kind of a girl crush on her for years.” Really? For years? It’s hard to imagine she ever gave Elizabeth Edwards a thought until John Edwards’ affair (and possibly his child) with Rielle Hunter made headlines.

Flanagan clearly feels it’s her right in this book review to invoke the name of the couple’s tragically deceased son Wade, and not just once. She writes with authority that Elizabeth Edwards is tending her home “as a tribute to her late son.” Just how does Flanagan know this? You would think Wade Edwards had been her nephew, or cousin, the way his death has affected her. Flanagan has the audacity, in fact, to feign empathy for Elizabeth Edwards’ situation by recounting to us the story of the funeral of a teenage boy she attended many years ago, a student of hers who died in a car accident…. just like Wade! How this has anything to do with Helen Gurley Brown seems beside the point–Flanagan wants to trash John Edwards today and revere the institution of marriage. If she can do it in pages allotted to a book review, so be it. She’ll just figure out a way to get back to Brown again at the end.

As she describes the funeral, Flanagan is working hard to get us to picture her friend’s mother’s grief. The woman who can’t get out of the car, who can’t face the truth of her son’s death. Flanagan admits that she didn’t love this boy. In fact, she writes,

“I had never loved anyone yet, because I was years away from having a child of my own, and until you’ve done that you’re just guessing about love, gesturing towards it, assuming that’ it’s the right name for a feeling you’ve had.”

So poetic, yet so insulting. Anyone childless out there listening? Hear this: until you have a child, you will not know real love. Only mothers–mothers like, say, Flanagan–can have their hearts torn out by grief.

In the end Flanagan wants to stick it to Rielle Hunter, letting her know that no matter what, John Edwards is going to stand by his wife Elizabeth. No, Rielle, you’re not getting a piece of that North Carolina mansion. Flanagan softens her bite a bit in writing about Hunter only when she discusses the woman’s “late life baby.” (Hunter was 44.) Surely Hunter’s decision to have that child had nothing to do with love, surmises Flanagan, but more to do with

“the powerful emotions that accompany all pregnancies, but especially those that occur in women who probably thought they would never get to have a baby, and who find out, at the 11th hour, that the dream might come true after all…”

Because isn’t that the dream we all have? The baby, the hubby with the great hair, the big mansion in North Carolina? And Flanagan admits she’s basing all this largely on “what I’ve come to learn about women’s dreams and desires.” No doubt she’s only studied her own.

Perhaps Flanagan’s own marriage is such a golden ring itself she can’t imagine anyone not wanting it, or perhaps it’s not so golden and she’s rationalizing feelings we’re not privy to in this so-called book review. But the take-away message is clear: Flanagan isn’t really interested in Helen Gurley Brown’s life, or in Scanlon’s biography. She’s interested in promoting marriage for the sake of the children. And I have a hunch that interest arises from the need to set herself up as an expert on children, in order to promote her forthcoming book about–mothers, brace yourselves–pubescent girls (Flanagan, by the way, has two sons).