By the end of the first chapter of Ann Romney’s new book, you learn that she has had a miscarriage, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and that husband Mitt worried about intimacy issues with his wife.
In an age in which we want our politicians and their families to put it all out there, Romney does just that in her memoir, “In This Together,” released Tuesday. In one passage, Romney recounts a conversation she and Mitt had with her doctor about the disease’s toll on her body and their marriage.
“I’ve learned that people with MS, they are able to find other ways of expressing their intimacy that can be just as gratifying,” the doctor told the Romneys.
He went on to share the story of one couple who created intimate moments by just hooking their pinkies.
“Mitt looked at him as if he were crazy,” Ann Romney writes. “We’ve been through so much since that moment, but we’ve never forgotten it. In fact, since that day, sometimes when we’re together in a stressful situation we’ll grasp pinkies.”
Last October, I wrote about our former governor and first lady seeding a $50 million fund-raising effort for the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s. Romney’s proceeds from the book will go to the center, and she begins a book tour that comes to New England next week. More than 50 million people worldwide suffer from these brain-related illnesses, including Lou Gehrig’s, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s.
The book provides a front-row seat to the powerful couple’s most vulnerable moments, when the “Mitt Stabilizer,” as Ann is known in the family, is afflicted by a mysterious condition that leaves her lethargic and barely able to walk. Mitt would later describe the day she was diagnosed — Oct. 25, 1998 — as the “worst day of his life,” with the couple breaking into tears in the doctor’s office.
There is no cure for MS, a debilitating disease in which your own body attacks the protective sheath around your nerves.
“I imagined it like an army of Pac Men inside me, chewing away,” Romney writes. “From everything I could determine, the inevitable outcome would be me sitting in a wheelchair, incapacitated, dying young. My life as I knew it was over. There was nothing I could do to prevent it.”
Ann Romney would soon fall into a depression.
I asked Romney, 66, why she is so candid and whether she felt at times she gave out too much information.
“Yes,” she told me. “You know something? I am not afraid of anything anymore. Nothing intimidates me.”
She explained that the book is not just for those suffering from MS, but for any others facing struggles.
“If I can say I have been really low, maybe it’s easier for them to have to go through something,” she said. “My intent really was to be as honest as I could be.”
This memoir confirms what we’ve known for a long time: This stay-at-home mom of five boys is one of Mitt’s most trusted advisers.
She writes that she was the one to persuade Mitt to leave his lucrative job as chief executive of Bain Capital to rescue the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. They uprooted to Utah, where she discovered reflexology and horseback riding as alternative therapies for MS. Along with the help of steroid injections, her condition went into remission.
With the Games a success, the Massachusetts Republican Party wanted Mitt to run for governor. Ann was “ambivalent” because she didn’t want to leave the life they built out West. He would be a good governor, she felt, but it boiled down to this: Boston was where she became sick, Utah where she got well.
She sought advice from her Brigham neurologist, Howard Weiner, who did not think a political campaign would trigger a relapse. “You can handle it,” he told her. “The one thing you have to be aware of is hitting the wall. If you get tired, you have to stop.”
The Romney clan had one of their family meetings to decide if Mitt should run. Everyone else was for it. Then it was up to Ann. Her opinion, she knew, mattered the most to Mitt.
“ ‘Let’s do it,’ I said — or something like that which conveyed a lot more confidence than I felt,” she writes.
The biggest legacy Mitt left as governor was making Massachusetts the first state to mandate health insurance — Romneycare before there was Obamacare. She believes her struggle with MS helped Mitt understand the importance of health care for all.
“I take no credit for Romneycare, but I’m glad that I was part of Mitt’s motivation and determination to create and implement it,” she writes. “Perhaps my MS had a small but real influence.”
She kept a low profile during her husband’s gubernatorial race and his first presidential run in 2008. She didn’t want to risk a relapse.
When the extended family met to decide whether Mitt should enter the 2012 White House race, the vote was 10 to 2 against — only Ann and their oldest son, Tagg, were in favor. But weeks later, Mitt, she writes, “came around to my way of thinking.”
Ann Romney agreed to campaign several days a week and to do interviews. Her role: to humanize Mitt. But when Super Tuesday rolled around, she overdid it. She began losing her speech and her balance.
After introducing Mitt at an event in Florida, she sat down backstage and declared, “I’m done.”
She returned a few days later, but in the end Mitt would lose again.
The Romneys contemplated running in 2016 but decided against it in January. Any misgivings now that Donald Trump, of all people, is leading the Republican pack?
“We have no regrets,” she told me. “Every day we look at each other and go high five; ‘Aren’t we having a great life?’ ”
Ann Romney, the MS patient, has come to appreciate that.
“I am well and I am strong, but I am also vulnerable,” she said. “I know I am on a tight wire, and I can fall off at any moment.”
Shirley Leung is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at shirley.leung@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @leung.