Ahem: “John Edwards, Salad, and Me.”

If you were unfortunate enough to read Rielle Hunter’s What Really Happened: John Edwards, Our Daughter, and Me (I didn’t have much choice; some things in life are beyond our control), the first thing you probably noticed is that she’s an absolute idiot. The second is that she loves salad.

With each new chapter of this slender but not slender enough volume, it seems she’s traveling to yet another dreary hotel for an assignation with Edwards. (She calls him “Johnny” almost as relentlessly as she eats salad, for “Johnny” is what’s on his birth certificate and thus most representative of his true self. If you search the Kindle edition of her book for “Johnny,” the device will pant and wheeze before the results exceed 500 and it stops counting.) He is so busy with campaign commitments and marital spats that a bored Hunter has no choice but to console herself with salad. Lots of salad.

Let’s stroll with her down a lettuce-strewn memory lane, shall we, and revisit these tender scenes from her past.