And that’s it?

There is a line in the acknowledgments for Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s bestselling memoir: True Gretchthat says it all. On page 157 – the actual book consists of 156 small pages, including several blank pages and a recipe for shamrock rolls – she thanks her ghostwriter Lisa Dickey.

“With their guidance and skills, we wrote the book we wanted in record time,” says the Democrat.

I ask myself: Why? Why was this done in “record time”? What was the rush?

I guess that depends on what your $27 book is supposed to be. The ideal for any book, even a political memoir, would be that the author has a message or a story that she really wants to share, and so she takes up the pen to give it to the world. You know, like Barack Obama tackles complex racial issues in Dreams of my father or JD Vance was driven to tell the story of the Appalachians in Hillbilly Elegy.

It is not. After reading what Stephen Colbert called a “slim” book in about three hours, which was about an hour longer than if I hadn’t taken notes, it seems clear to me that “True Gretch” is the dream child of publishers and political consultants. I refuse to believe that when they conceived this book, they foresaw the circumstances that might make Whitmer a serious contender on the Democratic ticket this year, but it’s clear that someone eventually talked her into it. Then, when she agreed, they insisted that it would be good for visibility and sales to release the book in the heat of the 2024 election.

And so everything about this book has a purpose. The simple prose, punctuated by bland aphorisms (“It’s so important to be able to find the light” or “Embrace your mistakes”) and mild swear words, tells you that Whitmer sees herself as straightforward, direct and “real.” The “True Gretch” playlist tells you that she’s hip in a Generation X kind of way, and her grandmother’s recipe tells you both that she’s domestic and that she reveres the past. It’s “Chicken Soup for the Michigander’s Soul”, sold as a low-tension tonic for difficult times.

What it isn’t, though, is revealing. I mean, unless you count the fact that drunk Gretchen once puked on her high school principal as a teenager, or that she keeps a cardboard cutout of herself in a closet to scare guests. There are a few little details I don’t think we knew before, like the fact that she was at the Lansing Capitol the day of an armed anti-COVID shutdown protest in April 2020, or that she called former Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy, who was presiding when the Sandy Hook massacre happened, for advice on what to say when she drove to Oxford in 2022 after the Oxford school massacre.

But these are mere tidbits. At no point does she deviate from the most important events of her public life – her revelation in the Senate that she was a rape survivor, her election, the time her State of the Union dress was mocked, Covid-19, her confrontation with Trump, the assassination plot against her, the Midlands flooding and the Oxford shooting. She may reveal a few new details about these events in this book, but she steadfastly refuses to open up any chapters of her public life here that we did not already know about.

What we see here is the political persona that she consciously developed and that she lived for so long that even her personal preferences – like not being called “Gretch” or not having to talk about her clothes – are subsumed by the project or brand called Gretchen Whitmer.

And that raises the obvious question: What’s next for this brand? Will she run for the White House after she leaves office in 2026? The excruciating care with which Whitmer takes to appear soft and inoffensive here suggests that she obviously will. What other reason would there be for Whitmer to write this weak sauce and rush it into print?

Maybe that’s all there is to Gretchen Whitmer. But after interviewing her a few times, I know that’s not true. She’s much more complex and intelligent than you’d think. True GretchAnd it’s really sad that she thinks she has to be that way to get where she wants to go.