Christine Quinn's Cloudy Revelation - NYTimes.com Damon Winter/The New York Times Christine C. Quinn cited in a recent interview a past struggle with bulimia. The effect of the disclosure on her campaign is unclear. The current issue of Vogue features a portrait of the mayoral contender Christine C. Quinn standing on the steps of the New York Public Library with a windswept lift to her pageboy, wearing beige stilettos and a cobalt blue sheath designed by Carolina Herrera. The look says Determined Ladylike, and what follows to fortify the message is an excerpt from her coming memoir, "With Patience and Fortitude," in which she intersperses the story of the vote to legalize gay marriage in New York State with anecdotes about fierce budget negotiations she was simultaneously conducting on the City Council, all of which preceded her search for a wedding dress ("I kept saying to the staff, "Call the union back." " "The first place we went to was Vera Wang.") The piece exemplifies the extent to which female politicians remain under a certain pressure to perform both the role of the broad and the girl - tough closer on the one hand and winsome consumerist on the other. Last year, Ms. Quinn was photographed for The New York Times, in an apron, baking a strawberry rhubarb pie at the weekend house she shares with her wife, Kim Catullo, on the Jersey Shore. More recently, she appeared on the cover of New York magazine in a leather jacket, with a severe collar, pointed upward, which made her look as though she were preparing herself for a science fiction remake of "Easy Rider." The costume changes have been varied enough that it has been easy to regard the City Council speaker as the Cindy Sherman of our political class. Although the lead in the mayoral race thus far belongs to Ms. Quinn, her slipping favorability rating, along with the prospect of Anthony D. Weiner's entering the race, has fostered obvious skepticism about her most recent efforts to deepen the textures of her image. Last week, in an interview with The Times's Kate Taylor, Ms. Quinn revealed that as a teenager, with a dying mother, she became bulimic as she tried to alleviate her mounting stress. Ms. Quinn said that later, when she was a young woman, her struggle with bingeing and purging continued, and so did a problem with alcohol. In 1992, in her 20s and under the guidance of Thomas K. Duane, then her boss and a city councilman, she entered a rehabilitation center in Florida. "When I did this, I didn't know what the reaction would be," Ms. Quinn said of her disclosure to my colleague. And I still don't really. Telling voters that you were bulimic comes with no certainty that they will find it endearing. Five years ago, a former British deputy prime minister, John Prescott, wrote about his own experiences with bulimia ("I took refuge in stuffing my face"), a condition he said resulted from the unmanageable tensions of political life. But he made this confession when there seemed little to lose, after he had left office. Ms. Quinn is known to unleash anger easily. And yet if her motivation in telling the world that she used to eat tubs of ice cream was to shift attention away from her reputation as an emotionally volatile pitcher of office tantrums - which is an assumption - then it is unclear what has actually been gained. All Ms. Quinn has ultimately done is underscore that her current problems of impulse control have a long biographical precedent, and that while she has courageously overcome two of those symptoms, she hasn't succeeded in vanquishing her temper, which has a broader range of public repercussions. The purpose of building a narrative around surmounted weakness is to create the sense that you live among your constituents and not above them. But Ms. Quinn rarely if ever lends the impression that she is not relatable, another factor that makes her revelations seem less clearly expedient. As a child of middle-class suburbia with a big mouth, a raucous laugh and the kind of money that doesn't buy island compounds (or elections), she is already in possession of as much realness capital as a politician could hope for. Ms. Quinn doesn't have a personal authenticity problem; she has a political authenticity problem, which talking about food or alcohol addiction cannot manifestly solve. A former community organizer and housing advocate whose liberal bona fides have been abraded by an aura of coziness to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, she famously reversed her position on term limits, came too slowly to a passage of a bill to require paid sick leave, arguably conceded too much to business interests on the living wage. When she appeared at a forum on affordable housing with other Democratic mayoral candidates at New York University last month, she emphasized her interest in expanding the range of options for the middle class but brought discernibly less passion to the matter of solving housing problems for the poor. Ms. Quinn's friends insist that her soul is the soul of a real progressive; if it is, she should tell us; we're listening.