Elizabeth Edwards: I Went to the Bathroom and Threw Up

Elizabeth Edwards "cried and screamed'' after her husband John confessed to an affair, she says in a new book. "I went to the bathroom and threw up.''

The New York Daily News got hold of an early copy of the book, Resilience, due in book stores on May 12. In a story today, the paper reports that John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, told his wife about the affair right before announcing that he would run for president again in 2008.

"He should not have run,'' his wife says in the book, though she certainly threw herself into his campaign for the Democratic nomination.

His political career ended when the National Enquirer ran photos of him running away from tabloid photographers in a hotel in Los Angeles, where he was meeting his mistress, Rielle Hunter, and her newborn daughter.

In the TV interview in which he admitted the affair, Edwards stressed that his cancer-stricken wife had been in remission at the time he strayed. But that only cemented the public's view of him as a self-deluding narcissist -- or as the Daily News put it, a "campaign cad.''

In Resilience, Edwards refrains from naming Hunter, but describes her as a groupie whose life is "pathetic.'' According to the book, Hunter came on to the candidate at a campaign event in New York, telling him, "You're so hot.'' It's hard to imagine why he would have repeated such a lame opening line to his wife – especially since even when her husband told her about the relationship, "he left most of the truth out,'' she writes.

Though it's not clear whether the couple still share their 15,000-square-foot home in North Carolina – she's been seen sans wedding ring, and has referred to her husband as "my children's father'' – the book jacket says they do, noting that she lives with her children and husband -- in that order.

The Daily News report describes the new memoir as "laced with a powerful dose of forgiveness,'' and highlights this quote from it: "I lie in bed, circles under my eyes, my sparse hair sticking in too many directions, and he looks at me as if I am the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. It matters.''

After all she's been through – the death of her 16-year-old first-born son, her cancer, and now her husband's very public betrayal, writing this book was doubtless therapeutic – and why should the National Enquirer get the last word on the story of her life?

Yet after all the public has been through with John and Elizabeth Edwards – namely, believing her buffed-up, wildly inaccurate view of him – her credibility as a narrator is in serious question. Of course I'll read the book, and hope for her sake that it sells a million copies. But will I believe it? Only as a reflection of what she believes to be true.