Julia Thorne was a political wife who hated politics. Married to senator and presidential hopeful John Kerry until 1988, and daughter of the economic minister to Italy, Thorne spent more than 30 years of her life knee deep in the political mud. But politics, she wrote in her 1996 memoir A Change of Heart, led only to “anger, fear, and loneliness,” a loneliness that at times barreled into depression.

Thorne, who grew up, in her words, a “high society jet-setter,” never officially enrolled at Radcliffe, but took classes there and at the New York School of Interior Design. She was ill at ease in both the society world into which she was born and the thorny world of politics which she later entered. As Douglas Brinkley, a Kerry biographer, told the Boston Globe, Thorne “didn't enjoy the breakfasts, the lunches, the shaking of hands: the upbeat rigamarole of politics. She loathed the back-stabbing of it.”

In the 1980s, Thorne began a long battle against depression, the Boston Herald reports, an experience that became the foundation for her bestselling 1993 book, You Are Not Alone: Words of Experience and Hope for the Journey through Depression. She also founded The Depression Initiative, a nonprofit foundation that educated people about depression.

But Thorne was, first and foremost, a mother. She had two daughters, Vanessa and Alexandra, with Senator Kerry, who called her “the best mom two daughters could want.”