By Michael Shepherd - Aug. 25, 2023
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A new book gives us a glimpse at the governor's pandemic journals. Gov. Janet Mills has been on the book circuit over the last few months, including on Thursday, when she appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" and ended the day with an event hosted by a Bangor bookstore.

It is not the governor's book, but it is her story. Journalist Shannon A. Mullen chronicles Mills' pen-pal relationship with homesteader Ashirah Knapp of Temple during the early part of the pandemic in her book "In Other Words, Leadership." It draws on the letters between the two women and about 50 pages of the governor's private journals made available to the author.

Mullen met Mills at a dinner party hosted by their mutual friend, the painter Jamie Wyeth, and the author said her aim was to tell a story about positive moments and the power of connection during an isolating era. But there are some interesting journal entries that tell you about Mills life at this time.

For one, her journal gives a sense of what it was like to govern in isolation. In March 2020, she often worked from a small office in the Blaine House and ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, relying on close friends and family that she talked to nearly every day.

“When are the locusts coming?” she remembered asking staff in her journal after the Jay paper mill explosion in April 2020.

The experience was isolating — voluntarily or not. In September 2020, Mills wrote that she was going to Baxter State Park to spend 24 hours without cellphone or internet access to "perhaps find some peace of mind."

The next month, she and key staffers took a retreat to Acadia National Park to work on a high-court nomination. While quarantining in the Blaine House that December after potential exposure to the virus, Mills said she was "alone upstairs all day" in "a pretty palace."

Perhaps predictably, politics crept into her journal at a time of deep polarization. After the riots of Jan. 6, 2021, she called then-President Donald Trump "simply repulsive." She harshly criticized him during their overlapping tenures, and he once called her a "dictator" for her pandemic policies, but the criticism she levied in her journal was stronger than what she said out loud.

"I cannot think of anyone in public office who has demonstrated less dignity, less integrity, and who has had so much greater a love of self than of the nation," Mills wrote then.

This is not a critical book. Keen observers won't learn a lot of new stuff about the Mills administration itself and its official actions during the pandemic. There is still a human story here about the correspondence between Mills and Knapp and about what it is like to make decisions during a tough time.