Sarah Palin Stunned

The message arrived by email. After more than three decades of marriage, Sarah Palin learned through an attorney that the life she had expected to continue with her husband was coming apart. The distance built into that method of communication became part of the hurt: something intimate and life-changing delivered in the language and format of business.

Palin was accustomed to confrontation in public. Campaigns, television commentary, political criticism, and late-night jokes had all made her a familiar target. Those experiences demanded a public response, or at least a public face. The end of a marriage asked something different of her. There was no speech that could restore the private certainty she had lost.

For many people, Palin’s name immediately calls up her political career. She had been Alaska’s governor and a vice-presidential nominee, roles that made her recognizable far beyond her home state. Yet the woman receiving that email was also a wife and the mother of five children, confronting a separation that reached into the structure of her everyday life.