Sarah Palin's editor Adam Bellow may be a man after our own heart — or least he used to be. He apparently co-wrote Terminatrix: The Sarah Palin Chronicles, a 2008 paperback making fun of then-VP-candidate Palin.
"Informed sources" tell Lloyd Grove that Bellow (son of novelist Saul Bellow) wrote Terminatrix with Bruce Nichols, then his coworker at HarperCollins and now editor-in-chief of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The book was published anonymously, with the credit line, "Compiled by the Editors of the Wasilla Iron Dog Gazette." When Grove asked Bellow for comment, he said, "You're kidding, right? I'm sorry, I can't talk to the press about this." And Nichols said, "The authorship of The Sarah Palin Chronicles has never been publicly disclosed. The editors of the Wasilla Iron Dog Gazette have not been revealed. I cannot comment on their behalf. Try Adam."
Terminatrix doesn't actually sound all that funny — sample joke: Sarah Palin's head Photoshopped onto a dog's body, with the caption, "Sarah Palin won the Miss Wasilla Pageant in 1984, while in college" — but what is funny is that the guy who masterminded said Photoshopping but one year ago just had the privilege of editing "Sarah Palin's" book. We bet he enjoyed it. Also funny is HarperCollins PR rep Tina Andreadis trying to convince Lloyd Grove that there's nothing to see here: "Publishers publish a wide range of books on a wide variety of topics. We are thrilled to be publishing Governor Palin's book." And funnier yet is ghostwriter Lynn Vincent's agent's response to Grove's question: "Lynn is under a very strick [sic] confidentiality agreement and cannot engage on this." It's good to know that the real writer of Going Rogue moves in such linguistically adept circles.
Of course, the million-dollar question (about to be answered for one and all on November 17) is this: what's in the 400-page tome that reformed Palin-mocker Bellow edited? Not "the down-and-dirty details of her rumored messy marriage," a "publishing insider" tells the National Enquirer. Instead, the source says the book is "a renewed attack on Levi Johnston, 19, calling him 'a liar' once again for all the claims he's made against her after breaking up with Bristol and for saying he's going to battle for custody of baby Tripp." Palin apparently also claims that Levi is "bitter at the dissolution of his relationship with her daughter, and is trying to earn a fast buck at the ex-governor's expense." A full-on Palin-vs.-Johnston print war would be pretty fun, but what we really want to know is whether Bellow hid any subtle digs at Palin in amidst the red-blooded, real-American prose. Just to check, Palin might want to read over the book again. Or, you know, at all.
Palin Editor's Double Life [Daily Beast]
Rogue Palin Levi Attack [National Enquirer]
