If I were asked to describe Sarah Palin, the first words that come to mind aren’t exactly “bestselling author.” But here she is, the outspoken former governor of Alaska and self-proclaimed pitbull with lipstick, now a bestselling author with her 413-page memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life. It sold over 700,000 copies in its first week, and as of Dec. 1 it became the first political memoir by a conservative to sell over a million copies.

Okay. I followed the 2008 presidential election like some people follow soap operas, so I saw and heard a lot about Sarah Palin, and she never struck me as the literary sort. Listen to her talk, and not just to her funny accent: When she gets excited or frustrated, particularly in the infamous Katie Couric interview, there’s a flurry of runon sentences, as if she has a million ideas she wants to communicate but can’t find the patience to say them one at a time, like a nervous teenager in a high school debate tournament who lost all her notes. She rambles, talks a lot but doesn’t really say anything, tries creating the illusion of competently answering a question when she doesn’t actually know the answer. Sure, maybe the Couric interview was full of unnecessarily difficult questions designed intentionally to make her look stupid or hickish. Maybe it was unfair to ask the head of the executive branch of an entire state government to name any Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade that she personally disagreed with. Or even the names of any specific magazines and newspapers she reads. One would think a bestselling author (especially one who used to be a governor) could at least do that.

Only after reading Going Rogue did I realize that I was wrong. You see, she may seem like a simple, small-town girl who loves her family and a long day of hunting more than anything else in the whole wide world. She may seem like the kind of girl who seems far more likely to pick up a copy of Field & Stream or ESPN Magazine than The Economist or The Weekly Standard if you saw her at a bookstore (and considering the kind of girl we’re talking about, that’s a mighty big if). And she is. The first chapter opens with Sarah taking a leisurely stroll with her daughters down the midway at the Alaska State Fair. But she’s deceptively complex, our Sarah. This folksy demeanor is all part of her grand scheme to win back the White House from the socialists in 2012. She’s a political mastermind, but she’s just too Main Street for Washington. America simply wasn’t ready for her brand of tell-it-like-it-is honesty in 2008. She has no patience for bullshit and she’s not afraid to say so, and does, on page 2. They don’t call her Barracuda for nothing, you know. She tells us how she got that nickname on page 231, but that excerpt contains content far too graphic to reprint here. All I can say is that she’s hunted a lot more than just moose… have you ever read The Most Dangerous Game? Just kidding.

As I’ve mentioned already, the Sarah Palin we met during the ’08 campaign wasn’t the real Sarah. If you’re a Palin-hater who uses the Couric interview as proof of her being some wide-eyed Pollyanna who is too inexperienced, and just plain simple-minded, to have any real grasp of the complex nature of politics, oh boy, Tina Fey and the rest of the liberal media really must’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes! It’s okay, even syndicated conservative columnist Kathleen Parker fell for it. Mid-campaign, and much to the displeasure of most of the Republican party, she wrote, “Palin’s recent interviews with Charles Gibson, Sean Hannity, and now Katie Couric have all revealed an attractive, earnest, confident candidate. Who is clearly out of her league.” Then, she added, “If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.”

Well, Sarah now makes it perfectly clear to naysayers like Kathleen here that she herself was not the problem. “I choked on a couple of responses, and in the harried pace of the campaign, I mistakenly let myself become annoyed and frustrated with many of [Couric’s] repetitive, biased questions,” Sarah writes. She also says that she was “told to sit down and shut up” by McCain Campaign management at one time, never allowed to really speak her mind. If only she could’ve talked to Katie Couric about those terrorists Obama was pallin’ around with…

One little thing Sarah doesn’t really mention is her ghostwriter, Lynn Vincent. I’m not judging her for using one – many politicians who publish autobiographies do. But they usually mention that fact prominently so as not to be misleading about who really did most of the writing. The cover features Sarah, smiling and gazing away at something off in the distance, wearing a red wool sweater with picturesque Alaskan scenery in the background, like a model in an LL Bean catalog, with no mention of any other author whatsoever. She isn’t even mentioned first in the Acknowledgements section. Maybe Vincent was paid a handsome fee for her lack of credit in Rogue’s authorship. We’ll never know, because Sarah signed a non-disclosure agreement making certain details about her publishing contract with HarperCollins, interestingly enough, a company owned by Rupert Murdoch, the man who also owns Fox News, unavailable. Or maybe, Sarah’s people didn’t want the ghostwriter’s identity advertised. Fun fact – Lynn Vincent also ghost wrote the autobiography of Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin, the former head of the Army’s Special Forces Command, who believes that his duty in the military was to defend the Christian nation of America against Satan.

Another fun fact – Sarah’s contract for Rogue is worth somewhere between 2.5 – 5 million dollars, paid in installments. The actual total hasn’t been disclosed by HarperCollins. The average salary of an Alaska governor is roughly $125,000 a year. Sarah, who has traveled to a few cities on her book tour in a $4,000 per hour Gulfstream jet, says she’ll donate much of the proceeds to charity. Sarah announced the book deal in May 2009 then abruptly resigned as governor in July, her reason being “a higher calling.” Am I alluding that Sarah Palin quit for the money? Maybe, but one can never really be sure about matters like these. Let’s not forget that Sarah got her four-year bachelor’s degree after attending four different colleges over a span of five years. So what is it, then? Indecisiveness? Greed? Both? I could go on and on about this subject, but you know, much like Sarah Palin, I’ve never been very good at finishing thi—