Gisele Fetterman’s eldest son Karl, 13, got into the car with his parents after a sleepover and asked a heart-stopping question: ‘Would you and Dad ever get divorced?’
Her response surprised her husband, Pennsylvania Democratic Senator John Fetterman.
While he promptly answered ‘no,’ she replied ‘maybe,’ shocking her spouse of 17 years. ‘John was, understandably, surprised by my response,’ she went on.
‘But I explained that, though I loved him and hoped we’d always be together, I wanted to be realistic and honest with the kids about all of life’s possibilities,’ Gisele, 43, wrote in her new book Radical Tenderness: The Value of Vulnerability in an Often Unkind World.
The book is candid about how her world has often been upended by her husband’s political career and her experience living in the US as an undocumented immigrant and as a Brazilian-American who, at times, was misidentified as ‘the help’.
Released last week, the book veers between memoir and self-help.
Gisele writes that she used the ‘divorce’ conversation with her son to illustrate how important it is to ‘tell the truth.’
She also draws from her own experience as a child of divorce and seeing her parents happier after-the-fact. ‘I am not the mom who is going to lie to her kids,’ she wrote.
‘Divorce can be a devastating experience for any family, of course,’ she said. ‘But I do not want my kids to feel that their world will end if their parents are not together.
‘Instead, I want them to know that marriage is fine while it works and that it’s also fine when it ends.’
Gisele also dives into her 55-year-old husband’s myriad health challenges on the campaign trail that nearly ended his Senate campaign.
Fetterman suffered a stroke in May 2022 while running for the Senate and has since used an iPhone to translate incoming questions while at work as he continues to suffer from audio-visual impairment.
The Democrat has appeared despondent at times while acting ‘manic’ and ‘unhinged’ at others. Staffers said they ‘no longer recognized the man they knew,’ New York Magazine had reported in May.
Gisele wrote about how she was the one who first noticed something was off with her husband.
‘All of a sudden, I saw the side of his mouth droop as we were getting into the car,’ she recalled.
‘It was a slight movement, imperceptible to anyone not paying attention. But I could tell something was wrong. I insisted we go to the hospital.’
In the emergency room, doctors discovered he had had a stroke and needed to go into surgery to remove a clot that had formed during an episode of atrial fibrillation.
He still won the Democratic primary, while Gisele gave the victory speech on her husband’s behalf and accepted the congratulatory call from Joe Biden.
‘I had already become used to these sort of public appearances as SLOP,’ she recalled, using the acronym for second lady of Pennsylvania.
‘But the vulnerability of having to juggle John’s political commitments with supporting my children and John as he recovered meant that I felt teary more often.’
‘It was not unusual for me to cry during media interview, which reporters often noted in their stories,’ she said.
‘Perhaps there are some who think I should have kept my composure or not shown that I was overwhelmed, but it was less important to me to keep up appearances than it was to get through those days, when so much was in flux.’
‘What followed would be a lesson in both the perils and benefits of vulnerability on such a large scale,’ she noted.
She wrote about how John Fetterman’s Republican opponent, Dr. Mehmet Oz, used the stroke to paint him as ‘weak and unfit for office.’
‘I even received personal messages mocking his speech,’ she recalled. ‘The whole thing struck me as incredibly ableist and contrary to how my family was experiencing his recovery: as a success story.’
Fetterman also said she was appalled by the media narrative that the campaign was hiding something about her husband’s condition, arguing ‘we were being as transparent as we could possibly be.’
‘Of more import to me was managing my own feelings and that of my children. And in this difficult moment, I used my feelings to fuel me,’ she said.
‘This did not feel like a moment to shut off my emotions but rather a moment to lean in an feel the enormity of, well, everything.
‘To me, embracing emotion is necessary to staying present and awake to current circumstances.’
A similar episode transpired when the senator checked himself into Walter Reed for depression in February 2023.
Gisele recounted how she had sensed something was amiss then too. After Fetterman had won the election ‘he seemed sadder than ever,’ she recalled.
What was the ‘final straw,’ she said, was when her husband learned that a reporter – who had bonded with John after also surviving a stroke – had died by suicide.
‘We learned later that depression is common in the year after a stroke, and in John’s case, his experience was exacerbated by having to balance his recovery with the intensity of campaigning,’ she wrote.
‘In early February, I finally told him, ‘John, if something happens and you die tomorrow, the kids are going to remember you as a really sad person. Is that what you want?” she recalled.
The next day he checked himself into Walter Reed. ‘The media attention was unbearable,’ she said.
‘The day he checked into the hospital, I peeked out my window to see that there were news crews circling my home.’
She packed up the car and took the couple’s three children to Canada – Toronto and Niagara Falls – and was criticized for leaving the country.
‘It was the first time a politician had been so quickly and publicly vulnerable about depression or mental health challenges, so while some media attention was not surprising, I did not expect it to skew toward such cruelty,’ she said.
Fetterman argued that while culturally seeking mental health help as seen as ‘something embarrassing’ there is ‘no denying its benefits.’
‘When John came back home, six weeks later, he was back to his old self and better than ever – fully engaged with the kids, back to his early mornings, and ready to work enthusiastically,’ she recalled.
Fetterman doesn’t address more recent controversies in the book – that the couple has been roiled over the war in Gaza – with the senator steadfastly supporting Israel.
New York Magazine reported on the alleged rift, quoting a staffer who said Gisele told her husband: ‘They are bombing refugee camps. How can you support this?’
Another unidentified staffer said she was overheard on speakerphone saying, ‘Who did I marry? Where is the man I married?’
There was also a furor over her not wearing her wedding ring, but she divulged to the Daily Mail in May it was due to her work as a volunteer firefighter.
Meanwhile they also reportedly fought because she didn’t want to accompany him to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump after his election victory.
‘It was a whole saga,’ a former staffer said. ‘She wasn’t going to go and they had fights about it.’
To convince her the Mar-a-Lago trip was a good idea, Fetterman reportedly told Gisele it was an opportunity to showcase what a model Dreamer looked like in a bid to get the then president-elect to soften his views on undocumented immigration. Ultimately, she went.