Sarah Palin on the cover of her autobiography

Nov. 17: Is there anything the world doesn’t already know about Sarah Palin?

Surprisingly, yes. For instance, her relationship with God, Todd (why she didn’t divorce him) and the letter E (how she nearly reinvented it).

These revealing passages come into view in the earliest pages of Going Rogue: An American Life, her autobiography that went on sale today.

She says when a nun taught her how to write the letter E, it “seemed a naked letter to me so I was determined to reinvent it”. She “improved it with at least a few more horizontal lines”.

The two most powerful forces in Palin’s life converged as she sat in her high school gym and first put eyes on Todd Palin. “I actually whispered, ‘Thank you, God’.”

She really knew he was the one when “he told me he had become a Christian and had been baptised at a sports camp”.

But Palin also shares how Todd was rather uncharitable towards her when he told his locker-room buddies that Sarah “didn’t even know how to kiss”.

“My young, crushed spirit learned a lesson about guys that day: even the good ones can act like jerks,” she writes.

Todd’s good attributes made up for his shortcomings then, as they apparently still do today.

Todd Palin

“That day in sunny Texas when divorce rumours were rampant in the tabloids, I watched Todd, tanned and shirtless, take the baby from my arms and walk him back to the ranch house so Trig could nap while I made calls,” Palin writes. “Seeing Todd’s blue eyes smiling, I chuckled.

“Dang, I thought. Divorce Todd? Have you seen Todd?”

Palin asserts herself as a woman of appetites. “I love meat,” she writes. “I eat pork chops, thick bacon burgers, and the seared fatty edges of a medium-well-done steak. But I especially love moose and caribou. I always remind people from outside our state that there’s plenty of room for all Alaska’s animals ----- right next to the mashed potatoes.”

Palin quickly posits her faith as the pillar of her career, as if her successes have unfolded according to a grand divine plan. Her selection as McCain’s running mate was a “natural progression”, she writes in one section. “I don’t believe in coincidences,” she writes in another.

She relates she took a call from Pastor Rick Warren while she was showering one day during the 2008 campaign. He offered to pray with her. “I said, absolutely! Pray away!” Palin writes.

“I would never turn down prayer even with limited hours in a campaign day, standing in a few inches of water with a shower curtain for a wardrobe. You do what you’ve got to do.”

One thing she had to do was promote the book, and she appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show yesterday to do it.

It was a classic Oprah interview, devoid of actual news but with heaps of adorable-puppy-like moments, and gobs of teen-angst-type narrative as provided by Palin ---- real “look what the grown-ups did to me!” stuff.

She took on the role of a naive girl who thinks we’re so naive that we would believe she’s a naive girl who never could have guessed, say, that a candidate from the party of the Decency Police might face just a widdle bit of a pwoblem to have a teen daughter who was pregnant and not married.

“I thought it… could show some realism in an American life ---- in a normal American family,” Palin said, wide-eyed.

Instead, she insisted, she thought the real skeleton in her closet was having gotten a “D” in a course she took in college.

It took Oprah under two minutes to make it all about Oprah, when she took her first crack at a question, which was: “You know there were reports last year that I had snubbed you during the election by not having you on my show. Did you feel snubbed?”

This resulted in possibly the best Oprah-interview moment ever, when Palin responded that “it didn’t register ---- no offence to you, but it wasn’t the centre of my universe, okay?”

CBS News’s Katie Couric was dismissed as having a “partisan agenda” when, during an infamous multi-part interview during the campaign, she asked Palin what books and publications she read and Palin never named one.

“Why didn’t you just name some books or magazines?” Oprah wondered.

Palin explained that by the time Couric asked that question, she was already annoyed and, besides, it was being asked in the context of “Do you read?”

Still looking annoyed, she recalled how she left a rally “pumped up” and aglow, only to pull back the curtain and discover Couric waiting with camera and crew, or as she put it sourly: “There’s the perky one again.”

Oprah, who didn’t hide her surprise at Palin’s impolitic wording, came to Couric’s defence, noting: “You’re pretty perky too.”

Oprah asked about her daughter’s ex-boyfriend, Levi Johnston, who has been saying unflattering things about Palin and may be shopping a book of his own.

Palin began by saying that “national television is not the place” to air grievances against the father of her first grandchild, then proceeded to call him “Ricky Hollywood” and say that his plans to pose for Playgirl magazine amounted to “aspiring porn”.

The title of Palin’s book may be Going Rogue, but the Oprah show mostly showed a politician-celebrity going for broke.

LA Times-Washington Post News Service and New York Times News Service