John Fetterman’s just-released memoir, Unfettered, argues that he’s turned a corner and has everything under control. Fetterman was a “stubborn asshole” (his words), he was clinically depressed, he was in poor health, but that is, according to the book, all in the past. “I will never be the same person I was,” he writes, referring to his auditory processing issues, but “I actually feel great otherwise.”
Two days after Unfettered came out, Fetterman fell directly on his face from ventricular fibrillation, a life-threatening heart rhythm disorder that frequently leads to cardiac arrest and death. An unnamed spokesperson referred to the medical episode as a “flare-up,” as if Fetterman got a rash. I don’t know who Fetterman’s spokesperson is at this point—his last one recently departed—nor do I know how he’s actually recovering (he posted a smiling selfie over the weekend looking like he was midway through prosthetics and makeup for a Lord of the Rings spinoff).
I do know that in Unfettered, Fetterman writes about how he and his team “did our best to hide from the media … that I had mentally collapsed” during his 2022 Senate run. Fetterman’s belated confession does not inspire confidence that the public will receive accurate information about his health in the coming days and weeks. Nothing in Unfettered inspires confidence, really. I don’t think Fetterman cares.
In theory, Fetterman’s recovery from the stroke that almost killed him in 2022, amidst a run for U.S. Senate, would make for a compelling read. So, too, would his retelling of what happened early in his tenure as a senator: Fetterman got inpatient care for severe depression in February 2023, and remained hospitalized for two months.
Presumably, that was the original idea behind Unfettered when the book was pitched around to publishers in late 2023. A source previously told me the total advance for the project came in at approximately $1.2 million, with roughly $700,000 to $800,000 going to Fetterman, and the remainder going to ghostwriter Buzz Bissinger, the author of Friday Night Lights and other renowned works. That source—who had direct knowledge of the book negotiations and writing process—as well as a second source, told me that Fetterman and Bissinger did not get along. Bissinger did little to quell those rumors: He yelled at me, then hung up on me when reached by phone, and later told the New York Times that while he provided the template for Unfettered, it was Fetterman who delivered the content. “The book is John’s,” he said.
Bissinger is completely absent from the final product. He isn’t credited or acknowledged at all—not even a passing reference on the copyright page. I can’t say I blame Bissinger for distancing himself. After Fetterman returned to the Senate in April 2023, he went from being a center-left populist with gross views on Israel to a full-on genocidal contrarian who has much higher approval ratings among Pennsylvania Republicans than Pennsylvania Democrats. He has no political future, but the rest of us are stuck with him for three more years.
There is no audience for Unfettered, and I do not think Crown will get its money’s worth on this memoir. The day after Fetterman’s book dropped, I called a handful of Barnes and Nobles and independent bookstores in Pennsylvania. The Barnes and Noble in York—where Fetterman was born and raised—had sold zero copies. The Barnes and Noble in Philadelphia had sold two copies. An independent store in Pittsburgh and an independent store in Philadelphia each told me they weren’t stocking Unfettered, at least not at the moment. Another independent store in Philadelphia described interest in Unfettered as lukewarm. In fairness, things can of course change. But the early signs are not good. A few days after Unfettered came out, it was ranked No. 82,145 among all books on Amazon. As of Monday, Nov. 17 (not quite a week since the book’s release), it’s No. 15,713.
Unfettered is boring. It is 213 pages of what the country already knows about Fetterman: that he’s driven by interpersonal grievances, insecurities, and immaturity. He’s only reflective in bouts and fits. He spends all of four paragraphs talking about Israel, even though Israel dominates his social media feed. He has very little to say about President Trump, except that he is the president and so we must respect him.
The brief portions of the book that read as genuinely emotive and contemplative—where you can kind of tell Fetterman feels something—are about his childhood. On page seven of Unfettered, Fetterman writes that he once peed his pants on the school bus, due to being bullied. He also hams up being a loner, to the point where it’s hard to not roll your eyes and think, C’mon man, you’re a 56-year-old politician with a wife and kids. For instance:
Imagine going trick-or-treating and being told by adults that you are too tall to be the age you are, even though you really are just a kid. Imagine a list being passed around in class when you are in seventh grade rating boys in terms of their looks and getting a two. Imagine picking up Dungeons and Dragons in a vain attempt to find friends. Imagine all that, and you can imagine me.
Fetterman harbors regrets to this day that his parents had him when they were 19; he believes he ruined their lives. He painstakingly describes his educational journey, and why he chickened out of going to college on the West Coast. He wants you to know that he lived in squalor when he decided on his own accord (not out of necessity) to move to Braddock, a poor Pennsylvania town where he eventually became mayor.
Then Fetterman slams on the gas (metaphorically, for once) and zooms past anything threatening to contradict his claim that he’s an “authentic advocate” for regular folks. Though he grew up middle-class with a wealthy father, he defensively asserts that he was not a trust-fund baby, just someone who grew up “comfortable” with an “exceedingly generous” dad. His time at Harvard, where he got his master’s degree, is but a blip compared to his vivid descriptions of pissing himself and being funny-looking in middle school.
As one former Fetterman advisor texted me, “I think what comes across is the reality of who he is, which is a petulant child who never became a man and is always the victim of his own narrative—even though he’s never had a real job and lives off his dad’s money. It's all pretty sad and pathetic.”
Brief glimmers of pensiveness and introspection fully evaporate when Fetterman rehashes his career, his professional relationships, and his health. Early in Unfettered, Fetterman describes his 2022 debate performance against Dr. Oz as “one of the worst ever in politics.” But later, he characterizes the media’s collective reaction to that debate performance as unfair and out of touch, bragging that he raised a bunch of money afterward from everyday Americans who felt bad for him. In one especially evocative turn of phrase that I pray was not penned by Bissinger, Fetterman writes, “I realized then that the media has no finger on the pulse of an election. They live inside the circle jerk.” He concludes that he’s not sure why the media has “turned so negative,” but he knows “cancel culture is real.”
Fetterman additionally fumes about how certain media members treated him right after his stroke. From within the circle jerk, I will say I agree Fox News’s coverage of Fetterman’s stroke and his immediate recovery was disgusting. But in a footnote, Fetterman goes out of his way to clarify that “many of that network’s anchors have since apologized.” As with everything else, Fetterman’s beefs are with whomever he’s decided are to his left: “The right tells me I suck and calls me names. The far left calls for my death,” he dramatically claims.
“It seems like the only people he's forgiven are the people who did the worst thing anyone has done to him, which is making his personal health condition a national news story and berating him on TV news in front of millions of people,” another former staffer told me.
Fetterman beats Dr. Oz, and we get the chapters about his time in office, which are even bleaker than whatever you’re expecting. Fetterman doesn’t deny hating his job. He more or less brags about how, in response to a law designed to stop him from wearing hoodies and shorts on the Senate floor, he’s come up with a workaround: open the door to the chambers, signal his vote with a thumbs up or thumbs down, then leave. He whines about his office space, which is small and crappy. He complains about having to move to Washington, D.C. He admits he’s not really friendly with his colleagues, except for Alabama Republican Katie Britt.
“He would complain about being a senator, having to do the basic things with the job,” the same former staffer told me. “Dude, it's one of the easiest jobs out there, I don't know what to tell you … you've got a great salary, you work like half of the year and you have some of the best healthcare money can buy.”
Fetterman’s reported laziness and lack of attentiveness aren’t acknowledged in Unfettered. He does, however, detail other parts of his early days in the Senate, from before he was hospitalized for depression. He obsessively checked social media and demanded to examine staffers’ phones, thinking there was a plot to have him committed. He was so out of it that at an introductory meeting with then-Senator Sherrod Brown, he was basically nonverbal; his chief of staff at the time, Adam Jentleson, had to speak on his behalf, Jentleson says in Unfettered.
Jentleson was the main on-the-record source in an explosive New York magazine feature about Fetterman, which was published in May 2025, so it was interesting to see him quoted in Unfettered, too. (He’s cited much less than Rebecca Katz, who was Fetterman’s campaign consultant, and Bobby Maggio, who was Fetterman’s campaign manager and remains a senior advisor.) The New York magazine feature—which was deeply sourced from current and former Fetterman staffers—concluded that “Fetterman may present a risk to the Democratic Party and maybe even to himself.”
Though Unfettered tries to paint Fetterman as a man who’s got everything figured out now, the memoir actually subtly verifies much of New York’s reporting—just in bits and pieces, as opposed to responding head-on to what Jentleson and others alleged. The closest Fetterman comes to addressing the New York story comes at the end of the book, when he claims that unspecified parts of the piece are incorrect. He does not mention Jentleson or anyone else by name, and he breezes by many of the most damning aspects of the report:
While I’m certainly disturbed by the level of betrayal—and incredulous that a news outlet would have published the [health] records—I think I’m most disappointed at the collateral damage that has been done to openness around mental health issues.
The details of Fetterman’s “mental health crisis,” as he calls it, are perhaps the biggest reveal in Unfettered. Fetterman writes that he considered dropping his Senate bid after his stroke, and that he’s had suicidal ideations over the last few years. It is these experiences that led Fetterman to dedicate the book’s foreword to people suffering depression:
This is to anyone with depression, but especially to someone who is considering taking your own life. Depression lies to you. It will try to convince you that taking your life is the solution. Have you ever been physically unable to get out of your bed? Have you ever sized up the ways to do it? I’ve been there. You are not alone. Give yourself a second chance and stay in the game. True depression seeks to convince you there’s no path back to where you once were or a path forward to where you can just be. I promise you, there is one. I implore you to seek help. It works; I wouldn’t be here otherwise.
It is good that Fetterman was able to get help, and that his status as a United States Senator gained him access to world-class treatment at Walter Reed Hospital. Maybe someone who is currently suffering in silence will actually buy this book and be inspired to seek help too. Whether they are able to find any depends on how they were personally affected by eight Democratic senators, of which Fetterman was one, voting to reopen the government at the expense of millions of Americans’ healthcare.
