Wife of scandal-plagued SC governor plans memoir

NEW YORK – The wife of South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, who separated from her husband in the wake of his affair with an Argentine woman, is writing a memoir.

Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House Inc., said Tuesday it will publish Jenny Sanford's "inspirational memoir" in May 2010.

The publisher says Sanford "will grapple with the universal issue of maintaining integrity and a sense of self during life's difficult times."

The book is currently untitled, and financial terms were not disclosed. Jenny Sanford did not immediately return a telephone message Tuesday.

"She wrote the proposal herself and it's very good," said Carol Schneider, the head of public relations at Random House.

"She will probably be working with a collaborator on the entire book — more of a time issue than anything else because we want to get it out," Schneider added. "It hasn't been established who it would be."

Sanford's husband, once mentioned as a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2012, acknowledged in June he had a yearlong affair after disappearing from South Carolina for five days.

His staff told reporters he was walking on the Appalachian Trail. Instead he had been in Argentina with his mistress.

Sanford called the Argentine woman his soul mate during a later AP interview and said he was trying to fall back in love with his wife.

Jenny Sanford, a Georgetown-educated, former Wall Street vice president who helped direct her husband's political campaigns, moved out of the Governor's Mansion in Columbia, S.C., in August, returning to the couple's seaside home on Sullivans Island with their four sons.

She said she and her husband were working on their marriage.

She told the AP she found out about the affair when she came across a copy of a letter to the mistress in one of her husband's files after being asked to find financial documents.

She said her husband repeatedly asked to see his mistress in the time between her discovery and when news of the relationship became public.

"He was told in no uncertain terms not to see her," she told the AP. "It's one thing to forgive adultery; it's another thing to condone it."

Jenny Sanford was not at her husband's side when he revealed the affair at a Statehouse news conference.

She later released a statement saying that while her husband showed lack of judgment "his far more egregious offenses were committed against God, the institutions of marriage and family, our boys and me."

Shortly after the scandal broke, the governor's own book deal was terminated.

Publisher Adrian Zackheim said Mark Sanford had an agreement for a book on fiscal conservatism titled "Within Our Means."

It had been scheduled for publication next March by Sentinel, a dedicated conservative imprint within Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Zackheim called the agreement "a mutual decision."

Source: news.yahoo.com/