While in the McGreeveys’ case there was no hope of – or desire for – reconciliation, I suspect that in most instances, at least part of the book-writing and the talk-show appearances are about leveling the playing field. One woman I know whose husband had an affair had one of her own before the two of them began counseling to put their marriage back together. That may not be the wisest course of action, but I get it. Just as I get that women who have been humiliated on a worldwide stage may feel the need to do some humiliating themselves in order to get their own back, as it were.

In her Beast blog, Brown applauded Hillary Clinton’s more “concise walkthrough of remembered pain” when she appeared with Barbara Walters on "20/20" to publicize her own memoir. But Clinton’s responses are always measured, no matter what the subject, and her Herculean control with regard to her husband’s philandering was surely more about her own political future. Elizabeth Edwards never wanted a political future – except as a helpmate and adviser to her husband, and he’s already ensured that his own political future is over. Then there is the horrible fact that Elizabeth may not have much of a future at all. She’s still raw and groping her way through not just one set, but two sets of overwhelmingly painful revelations. While I too grimaced at the sight of John Edwards answering Oprah’s pointed questions while his wife looked on, I have certainly seen far more painful sights, as in the very public but silent humiliation of Joan Kennedy.

I was nine years old when Teddy Kennedy left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown beneath the bridge at Chappaquiddick, but I will never forget the deer-caught-in-the-headlights look on the face of Joan Kennedy, fragile and pregnant and terrified, standing with her husband as he left his arraignment (for leaving the scene of an accident), surrounded on all sides by booms and mikes and cameras and mobs of people. She subsequently lost her baby and would go on to fight a heartbreaking battle with alcoholism, yet, 11 years later, when her husband – in what I still believe was a singular act of cruelty – sought the presidency in 1980 and asked her to accompany him on the trail, she agreed to do it. (“Tell them about your music, Joanie,” Kennedy prompted, when a reporter asked a nonplussed Mrs. Kennedy about her own interests.)

These days Ted Kennedy is seemingly happily remarried, a lionized elder statesman, and the beneficiary of enormous sympathy as he faces his own mortality, while his ex-wife, largely forgotten, still battles her own disease. (In 2005, six months after she was found unconscious on a Boston street, she underwent surgery for breast cancer and is now essentially a ward of her children.)

Given the choice, I’d rather see Elizabeth Edwards still out there, telling her own story, rather than listening to it be told – even if it makes some folks want to turn their heads away from the TV screen. She’s doing what she feels she needs to do. Maybe it’s ill-considered, but I’ll say it again: Not a single one of us knows what is best for her. After so many questioned Silda Spitzer’s decision to stand by her husband – at the podium and beyond – Dina McGreevey appeared on CNN to explain what only the ever-expanding members of her club can know: “She’s ridiculed and shamed in front of virtually the entire world. She’s not only dealing with her own personal pain, she’s trying to protect her daughters from this. I was criticized for standing there. Hillary Clinton was criticized for standing with her husband. We all do it for very personal reasons.” And then: “You don’t know what it’s like unless you’re in the person’s shoes.”

Click here to read What Elizabeth Edwards’s Hairstylist Knows About John, by Julia Reed.