Jennifer Szalai, the nonfiction book critic for the New York Times, uncorked a nasty review of Sen. John Fetterman’s new memoir (D-PA) Unfettered in Wednesday’s edition (the review was written before Fetterman’s hospitalization after a fall). A petulant take-down which surely has nothing to do with Fetterman's willingness to buck his Democratic Party at times, right?
On a crowded shelf of memoirs by sitting politicians, John Fetterman’s new book has to be one of the strangest. The cover of Unfettered features a headshot of the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania as he frowns into the camera, his dark gray hoodie conspicuously speckled with debris. Inside the book, you’ll find none of the genre’s usual tropes: no can-do optimism, no affability, no evidence of a politician’s instinct to glad-hand for the next election.
But then it’s not entirely clear from Unfettered whether Fetterman, who has spoken openly about his mental health issues, plans to run for office again. Recalling the moment in November 2022 when he won an expensive Senate race against the celebrity surgeon-influencer Mehmet Oz, Fetterman, who had been hospitalized for a stroke a few months before, says he “felt nothing.” The next day he was in a “daze of doom.” Staring at a bridge, he contemplated suicide.
After noting Fetterman's "dismal attendance record" (perhaps a consequence of his severe depression), Szalai continued complaining.
Most of Unfettered is unrelentingly dour and mournful. Despite having parents who “provided me with every comfort,” Fetterman identifies strongly with blue-collar workers who feel betrayed and forgotten. He recounts the many times he felt overwhelmed by shame and self-loathing: “I didn’t deserve anything except loneliness and sadness and isolation.” In 2023, he spent six weeks at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center being treated for his severe depression.
Apparently Fetterman is a hypocrite, though Szalai couches those accusations in a passive-aggressive manner.
Fetterman, who says he wants “compassionate” immigration policy, was one of 12 Democratic senators who sided with Republicans in undermining due process for immigrants, and he was the only Democratic senator who voted to confirm Trump’s pick for attorney general. “It is not anti-immigrant to support a secure border,” he writes, though he does not say how he feels about what Trump’s version of a secure border has meant in practice — masked men pushing people into vans and immigrants being whisked away to countries they have no connection to. Fetterman’s wife, who was brought as a child to the United States from Brazil, was an undocumented immigrant. He doesn’t say anything in the book about that either.
He is similarly pat regarding his views on Israel, and his unconditional support for its war in Gaza. According to a letter by his former chief of staff that became a national story this spring, the senator “claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos.”….
The voice in this book is brooding but not particularly thoughtful. Fetterman offers generalized contempt instead of pointed arguments….
Meow. Szalai’s excessively hostile tone and callousness about Fetterman’s depression seems odd, given her paper’s previously supportive coverage of Fetterman’s mental health struggles, back when he adhered more closely to the Democratic playbook and wasn’t wandering off the reservation on issues like Israel. His iconoclastic tendencies were recently on display when journalist Katie Couric failed to bait him into criticizing President Trump or the late Charlie Kirk.
Szalai is the same scholar wrote a book review last year that drew the headline “The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous? One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.”
Here, she was gratuitously vicious to Fetterman, treating the Democratic senator like she might treat, oh, Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Anyone who has experienced depression will probably recognize the overgeneralization, the binary thinking, the closed loop of self-pity. At barely more than 200 pages, “Unfettered” is not especially long, but it starts to feel interminable. “I have been told I have a persecution complex,” Fetterman writes, “but that’s the way I am.”
Neal Pollack at The Spectator (World) pointed out Szalai managed to be outclassed by the liberal ladies of The View, who respected Fetterman’s struggles with mental illness in an interview, in contrast to the Times critic.
