Copyright The New York Times
UNFETTERED, by John Fetterman On a crowded shelf of memoirs by sitting politicians, John Fetterman’s new book has to be one of the strangest. The cover of “Unfettered” features a headshot of the Democratic senator from Pennsylvania as he frowns into the camera, his dark gray hoodie conspicuously speckled with debris. Inside the book, you’ll find none of the genre’s usual tropes: no can-do optimism, no affability, no evidence of a politician’s instinct to glad-hand for the next election. But then it’s not entirely clear from “Unfettered” whether Fetterman, who has spoken openly about his mental health issues, plans to run for office again. Recalling the moment in November 2022 when he won an expensive Senate race against the celebrity surgeon-influencer Mehmet Oz, Fetterman, who had been hospitalized for a stroke a few months before, says he “felt nothing.” The next day he was in a “daze of doom.” Staring at a bridge, he contemplated suicide. Most of “Unfettered” is unrelentingly dour and mournful. Despite having parents who “provided me with every comfort,” Fetterman identifies strongly with blue-collar workers who feel betrayed and forgotten. He recounts the many times he felt overwhelmed by shame and self-loathing: “I didn’t deserve anything except loneliness and sadness and isolation.” In 2023, he spent six weeks at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center being treated for his severe depression. His memoir, which is dedicated to “anyone with depression,” includes extended quotations from staffers and family members who implored him to obtain medical treatment and stick with it. Their worry for him is heartbreaking. His wife, Gisele, takes care to ensure that their three children won’t blame themselves for their father’s state. The children cover Fetterman’s hospital room with colorful Post-it notes, reminding him how much he is loved. When it comes to his mental health, Fetterman is willing to concede that he was wrong. He tried resisting treatment at first, out of despondency and denial. He felt something shift when a therapist reminded him how much his children needed him. “The doctors had saved my life,” he writes. “Unfettered” includes surprisingly little about his political positions. The pages that do have him defending himself from progressives who have been startled by his eagerness to work with President Trump, whom he visited at Mar-a-Lago before the inauguration. Fetterman, who says he wants “compassionate” immigration policy, was one of 12 Democratic senators who sided with Republicans in undermining due process for immigrants, and he was the only Democratic senator who voted to confirm Trump’s pick for attorney general. “It is not anti-immigrant to support a secure border,” he writes, though he does not say how he feels about what Trump’s version of a secure border has meant in practice — masked men pushing people into vans and immigrants being whisked away to countries they have no connection to. Fetterman’s wife, who was brought as a child to the United States from Brazil, was an undocumented immigrant. He doesn’t say anything in the book about that either. He is similarly pat regarding his views on Israel, and his unconditional support for its war in Gaza. According to a letter by his former chief of staff that became a national story this spring, the senator “claims to be the most knowledgeable source on Israel and Gaza around but his sources are just what he reads in the news — he declines most briefings and never reads memos.” In his memoir, he issues a pro forma line about grieving “the tragedy, the death and the misery,” but treats his position as a no-brainer. “There was no choice,” he writes. The voice in this book is brooding but not particularly thoughtful. Fetterman offers generalized contempt instead of pointed arguments. He thinks one of the Democrats’ main problems is that they are perceived as “soft and gooey” because of their “policies against men.” While it’s true that Democrats have lost support among male voters, Fetterman never specifies which “policies” these are, but he insists they were decisive: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.” A preoccupation with tough-guy masculinity seems to be an underlying theme. A flashback to 2001 has Fetterman fondly recalling how he made his home in the basement of an abandoned church in Braddock: “The place has a ‘Fight Club’ feel to it that I like, big and dingy and sparse and conducive to men beating the hell out of one another without anyone else hearing it.” In 2013, Fetterman thought he heard gunshots outside of his home and then chased a nearby jogger, using a 20-gauge shotgun to detain him until the police arrived. The jogger was Black and unarmed. Fetterman maintains that his political opponents were being grossly unfair when they criticized him: “If I had stayed indoors, they would have called me a coward.”
