Edwards went where Patrick Bateman has been?

Carefully worded rumors of John Edwards and an extramarital affair have been percolating on the Internet for the last few weeks. Today they finally boiled over into enough spheres of legitimacy that the Edwards' camp is issuing denials. Now that the cat is out of the bag, I'd like to share something I realized about alleged other woman Rielle Hunter.

After writing Bright Lights, Big City, 80's lit sensation Jay McInerney wrote a far less well-known book titled Story Of My Life. What I remember about the book (and why I remember it) was that it was done first person from the perspective of a slutty, drugged-out party girl named Alison Poole. I was writing a lot of fiction at the time, and always found it difficult to write female characters. So, to me, McInerney convincingly doing so for an entire book was a neat trick

It must have also impressed fellow 80's lit sensation Brett Easton Ellis, because he wrote McInerney's Alison Poole right into the cultural earthquake that was American Psycho. Being it was American Psycho, Poole's scene was short and includes brutal sodomy -- and the Kentucky Derby, if memory serves.

While McInerney and Ellis were friends, it always bothered me that Ellis had his fictional creation do what he did to McInerney's fictional creation. It seemed the height of disrespect.

Especially since fictional characters are often based on real people. And McInerney admits Alison Poole was directly based on his girlfriend at the time: Rielle Hunter. The same one who is now, 20 odd years later, tangled up with John Edwards.

If the rumors are true, Hunter doesn't give Edwards the Presidential gravitas a Marylin Monroe would. But anytime you share a woman with the great Patrick Bateman it's got to be worth something. Given American Psycho's continued popularity on college campuses, maybe even something with those elusive young cell-phone-only Iowans that everyone craves.