Readers of the Drudge Report and the National Enquirer know that Jamie-Lynn Spears' surprise isn't the only shock pregnancy of the day. Also knocked up is a woman named Rielle Hunter. Politicos and gossip-mongers might remember that name from a couple months ago as the overpaid John Edwards campaign worker who some had linked romantically to the married presidential candidate. Now, speculation is rife that Rielle--who has moved to North Carolina--is carrying Edwards' child.

Is this true? Well, I don't want to shock anyone, but Drudge and the National Inquirer have been wrong before. Regardless, I found out something pretty interesting about Hunter.

After writing Bright Lights, Big City, '80s lit sensation Jay McInerney wrote a far less well-known book titled Story Of My Life. What I remember about the book (and why I remember it) was that it was done first person from the perspective of a slutty, drugged-out party girl named Alison Poole. I was writing a lot of fiction at the time, and always found it difficult to write female characters. So, to me, McInerney convincingly doing so for an entire book was a neat trick

It must have also impressed fellow '80s lit sensation Brett Easton Ellis, because he wrote McInerney's Alison Poole right into the cultural earthquake that was American Psycho. Being American Psycho, Poole's scene was short and includes brutal sodomy--and the Kentucky Derby, if memory serves.

While McInerney and Ellis were friends, it always bothered me that Ellis had his fictional creation do what he did to McInerney's fictional creation. It seemed the height of disrespect, especially since fictional characters are often based on real people. And McInerney admits that Alison Poole was directly based on his girlfriend at the time: Rielle Hunter. The same one who is now, 20 odd years later, tangled up with John Edwards.

If the rumors are true, Hunter doesn't give Edwards the presidential gravitas a Marilyn Monroe would, but anytime you share a woman with the great Patrick Bateman, it's got to be worth something. Given American Psycho's continued popularity on college campuses, maybe it even means something to those elusive young cell-phone-only Iowans that everyone craves.

For more by Jeremy Taylor: http://www.jeremysspecialblog.blogspot.com/