In Radical Tenderness: The Value of Vulnerability in an Often Unkind World, the steely political-wife autobiography by Gisele Barreto Fetterman that comes packaged in the candied outer shell of self-help literature, the author writes of wanting, as a new mom, to “be there for one another when it came to daily challenges.” One day, absent any apparent invitation, Ms. Fetterman arrives at a friend’s house and “immediately” asks if there is something she can do.
Please, if I’m ever in your house, do not wait on me. Put me to work! I have a hard time sitting still, and I like having a job anywhere I go. Little milestones are important to me; I like to see that something was accomplished, even something small. I love the before and after, and any small improvement gives me a rush of satisfaction. So I desperately wanted Kristen to give me a task, but she wasn’t having it. At least at first.
“How can I help?” I kept pressing her. “Is there anything I can do around here to lend you a hand?”
“Nothing, Gisele,” Kristen said. But she seemed busy and stressed out, so I kept insisting. For a bit, she kept repeating that she didn’t need anything. But eventually she gave in.
“You’re annoying me,” she said. “Go clean my daughter’s room.” And I did. … Acts of service are my love language.
The “hard time sitting still” and pursuit of a “rush” are explained elsewhere in these pages as symptoms of ADHD, with which Ms. Fetterman—the Brazilian-born activist and philanthropist who is married to U.S. senator John Fetterman (D., Pa.), with whom she has three children—was diagnosed at the age of 38.
Not explored elsewhere are the implications of Fetterman’s decision-making when she tells us Kristen “seemed busy and stressed out, so I kept insisting.” The irritation this stoked in Kristen, who had other designs for her day than the assignment of housework to her friends, was made plain: You’re annoying me.
That one should be annoying in service to the greater good of “service,” the author’s love language, is a recurring theme. Fetterman recounts how “at least once or twice a week” at the Free Store, the all-volunteer nonprofit in the Fettermans’ hometown of Braddock, Pa., that she founded, giving away useful things to indigent people, she would resolve “heated arguments” by “pulling those involved outside and trying to help them connect.”
She succeeded, we learn, because she’d “have them play”—have them do it—”the ‘Just Like Me’ game.”
“Raise your hand if you like tacos!”
“Raise your hand if you’re a parent!”
“Raise your hand if you’re having a rough day!”
If they can relate, I instruct the patrons to say, “Oh, just like me!” as they raise their hands. At first, people get annoyed. [emphasis in original].
“I want people [who] spend an afternoon with me to say, ‘I just met the kindest person ever,’” she writes. “That is more important to me than whether others think of me as easy.”
Finally, Fetterman describes raising second child, Grace.
Now that my daughter is a teenager, she has become moodier and more dramatic. She changes her mind a lot and has become more stubborn. These are all traits I want her to have when she goes out into the world, even if it is sometimes difficult.
Who wants a child to be moody, indecisive, and stubborn as an adult?
Radical Tenderness summons the world’s pains in the ass (or is it pain-in-the-asses?) to unite and reshape the world in their sunnier-than-thou, every-little-bit-helps progressivist image.
But this book is more than that. Fetterman’s stories of emigrating from Brazil at seven, with her brother, mother, and grandmother, and of spending years chasing the American Dream under the shadow of undocumented status—they overstayed their visas—are genuinely moving and serve, as intended and about as well as any immigrant story could, as an anecdotal counterpoint to the harsh weight of current public opinion on illegal immigration. It is never explained, however, why it took Mamãe, Gisele’s “strong,” “resilient,” and bilingual mother, fearless and ingenious, 31 years to obtain citizenship.
This book would have been better, and received better, if presented as a straightforward autobiography and statement of principles, interpersonal and political, rather than as self-help SLOP, with obligatory servings of cherry-picked psycho-babble citation. Typical is this example: “In their book Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming It for the Better), Dr. Lindo Bacon [argues] rejection ‘threatens our sense of belonging.’” This is as penetrating an insight as the observation that starvation threatens a sense of nutrition. Also typical are feel-good prescriptions based acts of beautification: “Be a sunflower to your community.”
To your community, not in it—even if it annoys. For all its paeans to openness, dialogue, and consideration for the lives-lived of others, for all its lament over “the distrust of people with opposing political opinions,” Radical Tenderness—which nowhere explains why radicalism is held out as an unalloyed good—offers praise for not a single Republican or conservative. None, apparently, is a tender human being, worthy of the embrace Fetterman urges for ex-convicts and the poor and all else who support the Fettermans, their people, and their projects, which have aided many living at or below the poverty line.
Indeed, the book lays a neat trap for any critical reviewer, political opponent of the senator, or possessor of views different from Ms. Fetterman’s—such as abortion protesters, singled out here as “cruel.” Anyone critical of the book or the Fettermans is simply a diseased carrier of the unkindness the author diagnoses.
And yet it is also impossible to read this book without remarking on the frequency of the muddled thinking on display, contradictions in Fetterman’s view of herself and her approach to the world around her. We are told, for example, that the author worshipped Fred Rogers, the mild-mannered, long-running host of the PBS children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968-2001), where young Gisele learned new English words and the value of kindness and connecting with feelings. So distraught was Gisele over Rogers’s death on her birthday that “for several years” she didn’t celebrate it.
So you’d think the author would have internalized the very counsel she admiringly quotes her hero as having proffered in his 2002 commencement address at Dartmouth, one of Rogers’s final public appearances: “When I say it’s you I like, I’m talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see, or hear, or touch.” Seventy pages later, Fetterman confides: “I focus my efforts on what I can touch, on the people that I can reach and see.”
Of her founding of the Free Store, Fetterman writes excitedly that it was “the very first place where I was in complete control of the culture and environment I wanted to foster. I knew early on that I did not want to promote the same sort of culture which exists in many other workplaces [with their] emphasis on hierarchy.”
Yet hierarchy prevails on the title page of Radical Tenderness, where coauthor Concepción de León, a former New York Times reporter, receives smaller, lowercase billing beneath the larger, ALL CAPS billing accorded the author, and on the book’s cover, where de León receives—no mention at all.
It was not, as detractors contended, a PR stunt when Ms. Fetterman became a volunteer firefighter: She has responded to more than 250 calls. That makes her a bona fide hero in her community.
But respect for law enforcement here is nil—not a single cop is presented in a positive light—and the law fares equally poorly. While her husband was mayor of Braddock, Fetterman notes proudly, he officiated at same-sex weddings on the basis of illegal licenses issued by “a rogue judge.” “We are all brand-new versions of ourselves every day,” she writes. “None of us are tied to one decision or another if it makes us unhappy.”
To continue pointing out additional examples of such fuzzy thinking probably would be unkind.
If it is true, as Fetterman maintains, that her superpower is “a hyperawareness of the physical, emotional, and energetic shifts in those around me at that moment,” then Radical Tenderness reveals either how selectively the author uses her powers, or how narrow are the circles of people in which, for all her dynamism, she surrounds herself.
Radical Tenderness: The Value of Vulnerability in an Often Unkind World
by Gisele Barreto Fetterman
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 240 pp., $29
James Rosen is chief Washington correspondent for Newsmax and author, most recently, of Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936-1986.
The post Gisele Unfettered appeared first on .
Comments are closed.