McGreevey's Memoir: The Big Snoozy

by: Steven Hart

Sun May 21, 2006 at 10:59:48 AM EDT

To put this as delicately as possible: we don't want to know about who McGreevey slept with -- we want to know about who he was in bed with. And there ain't none of that in the excerpts distributed at Book Expo America, the year's biggest publishing event, just a lot of boilerplate about McGreevey's family life (yep, we're gonna hear about his military dad again) and his devout Catholicism. Oh yeah, and heavy-breathing huggermugger like this:

"I knew I would have to lie for the rest of my life -- and I knew I was capable of it," McGreevey writes. "The knowledge gave me a feeling of terrible power."

Is that the drums of destiny I hear? Or just the sound of unsold books hitting the remainder tables? The kind of tome McGreevey ought to write -- the tale of how a bright young man learned to slither his way up the greasy pole of backroom politics, with every name named and every detail given -- is the kind that would actually tell us something useful about our world. It's also exactly the kind of book that won't get a fat publishing deal in the current market. If these rubes think the world is waiting for stories of toilet-trading at Parkway rest stops, then I'm going into real estate sales. There's swamps to be subdivided and bridges to be sold, and now I know just where to market them.

Cross-posted at The Opinion Mill.