'Resilience' by Elizabeth Edwards

Let's face it. Most people who pick up this short but surprisingly deep memoir by Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former presidential candidate John Edwards, are looking for one thing and one thing only -- the dirt on his infidelity with videographer Rielle Hunter. And it's here, though sparingly. In fact, the strength of this book lies in how little of it actually has to do with John Edwards' caddish behavior.

That affair was, Elizabeth Edwards writes, a gut-wrenching addition to a life marked by tragedies sudden and inevitable, from the 1996 car-crash death of Wade, her oldest child, to the slow physical disintegration of her beloved parents; her discovery at a young age that her mother believed her father had had an affair, and -- finally -- the cancer that she has been battling since 2004 and that she expects will kill her.

Despite initial media accounts of "Resilience" ("After I cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up"), and the much-talked about Oprah interview Thursday, Edwards' battle with cancer and Wade's death dominate the new book, even more so than her 2006 memoir, "Saving Graces: Finding Solace and Strength From Friends and Strangers." "Resilience," in fact, can be viewed as a coda to "Saving Graces" -- a meditation on her life after learning about her husband's affair and the resurgence of her cancer.

The big question -- one that Hillary Clinton also has faced -- is why stay with him? For Edwards, the answer is clear. More than a romance, the marriage is a shared sense of purpose, of how to engage the world -- a partnership that transcended fidelity. "[A]lthough I no longer knew what I could trust between the two of us," she writes, "I knew I could trust in our work together."

In the early part of "Resilience" the rage, hurt and sense of betrayal simmers just below the surface, discernible in subtle ways. She dedicates the book to her parents, and in the one-page acknowledgment mentions her children, her parents again, her brother and sister and a family friend and her editor. But not John Edwards.

More telling, in the opening section describing her father's near-fatal stroke (and his remarkable 18 more years of life), Edwards writes of having to leave his hospital bedside to update "my children, ten-year-old Wade and eight-year-old Cate, where they waited in the hall with their father." Not "my husband" but her children's father. A wound still clearly gapes.