There’s a line in the acknowledgments of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s bestselling memoir, , that gives away the game. It’s page 157 — the actual book is 156 small pages that include several blanks and a recipe for clover rolls — where she thanks her ghostwriter, Lisa Dickey.
“With her guidance and skill, we wrote the book we wanted in record time,” the Democrat says.
About which I wonder: Why? Why was this done in “record time”? What was the big hurry?
I suppose that depends on what your $27 book is supposed to be. The ideal for any book, even a political memoir, would be that its author was welling up with a message or a story she longed to share and, thus, she puts pen to paper to gift it to the world. You know, the way Barack Obama wanted to explore complex issues of race in or J.D. Vance was driven to tell the story of Appalachia in .
This isn’t that. Having read what Stephen Colbert called a “slender” book – in about three hours which was about an hour longer than if I hadn’t been taking notes – it seems clear “True Gretch” is the lovechild of publishers and political advisers. I refuse to believe they anticipated when this book was conceived the circumstances in which Whitmer could seriously be on the Democratic ticket this year, but it’s clear someone finally prevailed upon her to do this. Then, once she bought in, they insisted getting it out in the heat of the 2024 election would be good for visibility and sales.
And so, everything about this book has a purpose. The simplistic prose, punctuated by bland aphorisms (“It’s so important to be able find the light” or “Own your screwups”) and mild swear words, tells you Whitmer sees herself as uncomplicated, straightforward, “real.” The “True Gretch” playlist tells you she’s hip in a Generation X sort of way, and the recipe from her grandmother tells you both that she’s domestic and that she reveres the past. It’s “Chicken Soup for the Michigander’s Soul,” sold as a low-voltage tonic for vicious times.
What’s it’s not, though, is revelatory. I mean, unless you count the fact that a drunk teenage Gretchen once vomited on her high school principal or that she has a cardboard cutout of herself in a closet to scare guests. There are a few small details I don’t think we knew before, such as the fact that she was in the Lansing Capitol the day of an armed anti-COVID-shutdown protest in April 2020 or that she called former Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy, who presided when the Sandy Hook massacre happened, to ask advice on what to say as she rode to Oxford in 2022 following the school shooting there.
But these are mere tidbits. At no point does she deviate from the tentpole events of her public life — her revelation on the Senate floor that she is a rape survivor, her election, that time her State of the State dress was mocked, COVID-19, her Trump run-in, the murder plot against her, the Midland flood and the Oxford shooting. She may give a bead of new detail from these events in this book, but she steadfastly refuses here to open any chapters of her public life we didn’t already know about.
What we see here is the political persona she has deliberately honed and has lived in for so long that even her personal preferences — to not be called “Gretch,” say, or to not have to discuss her clothing — are subsumed by the project or brand known as Gretchen Whitmer.
And that raises the obvious question: What’s next for that brand? Will she run for the White House after she leaves office in 2026? The excruciating care Whitmer takes here to be milquetoast and inoffensive suggests that she obviously will. What other purpose would there be for Whitmer to write this weak sauce and rush it into print?
Maybe this is all there is to Gretchen Whitmer. Having interviewed her a few times, though, I know it’s not. She’s far more complex and intelligent than you’d come away believing from True Gretch. And it’s a sad commentary, really, that she thinks she has to be this in order to go wherever she hopes to go.
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