What Do Miley Cyrus and Bryan Cranston Have In Common?
So lately, open letters from celebrities have been hard to escape. Attention-starved, well-meaning men and women of various degrees of fame have been unleashing their opinions (usually on the topic of one Miley Cyrus) to the world at large, in the hopes of…well, what exactly? In the hopes of getting Miley’s attention? Probably not. Probably it’s more about getting the attention of, well, everyone else because these are, after all, open letters.
But so, just like not all celebrities are created equal, not all of these open letters have been equally successful. Oh, sure, some of them have been getting plenty of attention in that all-press-is-not-actually-good-press kind of a way (what’s up, Sinead O’Connor) and some of them have been lauded for being funny and self-aware (hey there, Sufjan Stevens) and some of them have been accidentally open (as in private letters that got publicly shared) and so kind of brilliant (love you, Anthony Hopkins and your letter to Bryan Cranston). But it seems like we’ve officially reached a new low in the genre with the publication of an open letter of sorts from none other than Rielle Hunter, famed for being, uh, Rielle Hunter and sleeping with former Presidential candidate, John Edwards, having his child, lying about the paternity, and then writing a book about it. So! What was her open letter about?
Well, it was an apology. Titled, “I, Rielle Hunter, Apologize,” this open letter is something that I’m not really sure anyone absolutely no one needed to read. In it, Hunter, uh, apologizes to the public for forcing us all to pay attention to her affair with John Edwards. But, well, she’s apologizing now in the service of selling her latest book which is, I guess, a longer version of this open letter, so no need to buy it unless you really, truly want to think more about what it was like to have sex with John Edwards. Which, I don’t think anybody does! Do they? If you do, I don’t want to know. And, please, if you do? Don’t write an open letter about it. Enough with the open letters in general. Privacy is still a thing. It hasn’t totally disappeared despite the best efforts of the NSA and Google and Mark Zuckerberg. So please, please, stop with the open letters. Especially if they are just a twisted attempt to make people think of what John Edwards sounds like when he’s having an orgasm.
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