The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: Rodham: a Novel by Curtis Sittenfeld
Details: Copyright 2020, Random House
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): " From the New York Times bestselling author of American Wife and Eligible, a novel that imagines a deeply compelling what-might-have-been:
What if Hillary Rodham hadn't married Bill Clinton?
In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise: Life magazine has covered her Wellesley commencement speech, she’s attending Yale Law School, and she’s on the forefront of student activism and the women’s rights movement. And then she meets Bill Clinton. A handsome, charismatic southerner and fellow law student, Bill is already planning his political career. In each other, the two find a profound intellectual, emotional, and physical connection that neither has previously experienced.
In the real world, Hillary followed Bill back to Arkansas, and he proposed several times; although she said no more than once, as we all know, she eventually accepted and became Hillary Clinton.
But in Curtis Sittenfeld’s powerfully imagined tour-de-force of fiction, Hillary takes a different road. Feeling doubt about the prospective marriage, she endures their devastating breakup and leaves Arkansas. Over the next four decades, she blazes her own trail—one that unfolds in public as well as in private, that involves crossing paths again (and again) with Bill Clinton, that raises questions about the tradeoffs all of us must make in building a life.
Brilliantly weaving a riveting fictional tale into actual historical events, Curtis Sittenfeld delivers an uncannily astute and witty story for our times. In exploring the loneliness, moral ambivalence, and iron determination that characterize the quest for political power, as well as both the exhilaration and painful compromises demanded of female ambition in a world still run mostly by men, Rodham is a singular and unforgettable novel."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Recently, I enjoyed American Crime Story's third season, which details the events surrounding the Clinton impeachment trial. It was amazingly well-done, as typical for the series, and although all performances were excellent and there were many stand-outs, Edie Falco's relatively brief but momentous screen time as Hillary Clinton is a powerful reminder post 2016 that whether or not you agree with all of her politics and practices (personal and political), she is a fascinating, complex historical character.
When I saw this book, I was intrigued at the idea.
How I Liked It:
The term "RPF" refers to "real person fan-fiction" and consists of fictional stories about public figures, or fictionalized versions of what happened to them. This has existed since public figures have existed and Shakespeare and the Bronte sisters are among the many legendary authors that have written RPF. The Crown, Hamilton, and any bio pic you can imagine are all examples of RPF.
Generally when people say it though, they are referring to niche communities for fan fiction writing which write about real people (sometimes in a "slash" or romantic/sexual pairing sort of way) generally with the understanding that RPF isn't for everyone so they warn accordingly, and also, as with any fan fiction, do NOT show any of the parties about which you are reading or writing! RPF in fan fiction communities produced for fun and no profit and for solely those communities (meaning other fans) and is oddly controversial to some in a way big budget/high attention projects like screen adaptations or bestselling novels (like this one) are not.
What's the point of speculative history? Even people who love it are divided on why it exists. Mainly, it's just because it's interesting to imagine a world where a seemingly defining event did not occur. Whether it's JFK dodging the bullet, the allies losing World War II, or whatever you can imagine, speculative history (and time-travel fiction, for that matter) hit a particular peak in the last five years for reasons you can surmise. The premise of this novel is that Hillary Clinton never married Bill, thus the name.
The book is told like a memoir written by Clinton in presumably the book's year of publication (2020), as President. It all begins when she meets Bill in college, with flashbacks to her childhood with her belittling, verbally abusive father and championing mother. We're taken through her notice and meeting of Bill and his courtship of her and how he differs from her previous boyfriends. Things get serious and she meets Bill's family, and vice versa. He proposed marriage, repeatedly. But she also catches him cheating and they reconcile, but a financial misdeed during Bill's nascent political career spawns a vicious fight between them. They make up and she agrees to marry him, only to have Bill tearfully admit he'd only weigh her down and urging her to leave him. They endure a painful break-up.
When we next see Hillary, it's 1991 and she's an esteemed law professor (who has never been married and has no children, although she dates a bit) pondering a run for Illinois senate while watching in horror at the Clarence Thomas scandal. She watches as Bill attempts the '92 Presidential primary (and he calls her to solicit her endorsement, which she eventually declines to do), but when his scandals come up, they consume his chances and he drops out. Hillary steps on Carol Moseley-Braun to win Senate.
And we jump ahead to 2015, again with some flashbacks. Hillary is headed for President, but unfortunately, so is Bill. Bill Clinton, after an amicable divorce (and two kids) from his first wife, marries his much younger second wife as a tech billionaire, and is running on an "outsider" platform, having gone into the private sector rather than government. Donald Trump, who is NOT running, develops an animosity towards Bill and a strange affinity for Hillary. Hillary, realizing that Trump could appeal to potential Bill Clinton voters and sway them, carefully deploys Trump to ultimately win the election and become the 45th President. The book ends with Hillary having a new boyfriend.
Let me just say, I don't necessarily have a problem with RPF. I'm talking primarily about the niche fan fic version, but also "big budget" versions like this. Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton are both very much alive, but they're also public figures and therefore presumably used to this sort of thing, although this has some, er, interesting choices that we'll discuss.
I've only read two books out of the author's listed source material, Clinton's memoir of the 2016 campaign What Happened and reporter Amy Chozick's memoir of the 2016 campaign (covering Clinton), Chasing Hillary, but from the former and excerpts from Clinton's other memoirs I've read, the voice is pretty close. Detailing Hillary's history with sexism from a young age through college, and dismissals of her intelligence (and how her intelligence makes her unappealing to boys and men) is honestly an interesting read, particularly in the author's Hillary voice. Her surprise and draw to Bill Clinton's unique appeal feels convincing, mostly, and this would've frankly been a fascinating way to conduct the book without the "twist" of the alternate history.
Where things start to go awry is the incredibly graphic (and not terribly realistic, at least from what we know of them; I'll get to that) sex scenes between young Hillary and Bill. You can suggest they're two people crazy in love and having crazy sex without the level of detail this book gives which is distracting and off-putting at best and sleazy, possibly exploitative and deeply questionable at worst.
And then there was the sex. I recognized only in retrospect that it wouldn't have difficult, with my two former boyfriends, for me to transgress and not in a manner that they found arousing. That I could have made a sound that alarmed them, that I could have shown my body from an unflattering angle, that I could have seemed assertive or greedy when they'd planned to be the assertive, greedy ones. Once, with [ex boyfriend] Roy, when the way he was using his fingers on me wasn't working, I had finished with my own fingers, while also kissing him, and it was afterward, due to a certain sulkiness on his part, that I realized he'd been put off. I had never again touched myself in his presence.
In contrast, Bill was not only unfazed, but actively delighted by any sound I made, any way I moved. Sex with him was fun and tender and barely embarrassing or awkward or amusing in its embarrassment or awkwardness. (At one point, he said, "I want you on top of me," and I started to shift and had to say, "Okay, but my arm is stuck under you.") The general impression Bill gave was that he found me irresistible, at least as irresistible as french fries and an ice cream sundae; that nothing I did could repel him; that there was nothing in the world he'd rather be doing than stroking my body or kissing me all over. As impatient as he naturally was, he never rushed when we were in bed. He was leisurely, and I was the one who became increasingly, gloriously frantic.
And the truth was that when he was thrusting into me, I had such a strong sense of wanting him to come inside me, wanting no barriers between us, wanting the things we did with each other to be different from the things we did in the rest of our lives, with other people. None of this was remotely like what I'd felt with Roy or Eddie. I'd regarded their semen as, if not disgusting, then as messy and mildly regrettable, like a spilled glass of water.
When Bill was inside me, sometimes I was mindless with how good it felt, and sometimes I was aware, with a kind of granular precision, of the unlikely sequence of events that had made our lives intersect: his Arkansas upbringing, his stepfathers, his ambition and childhood and hard work, and the more ordinary circumstances of my childhood that had nevertheless set me on a path, primarily because of the fierceness of my mother's belief in me, to travel east and enter law school and meet this very particular person, this distinct and exceptional man. I'd think of my earlier belief that the things that made me most myself were a romantic turnoff, that no one would simultaneously value my intellect and find me attractive; I had wanted so badly to be wrong, and I'd struggled to find evidence that I was.
Yet here we were, with all of his skin touching all of my skin; he was kissing my neck, next to my ear, or we were kissing with our mouths open and our tongues mashing together. His body in my arms, pressed against me, was shocking. Looking into his eyes was shocking. That we were literally fused, that his erection was inside me and my legs were wrapped around him, hooked through the backs of his knees-- all of this was shocking. It was shocking that we'd found each other and it was shocking how natural yet thrilling having conversations with him were and it was shocking that we were naked, even though we'd never spoken until a few weeks earlier. Falling in love was shocking, utterly shocking. (pgs 68, 69, and 70)
After Bill is accused of sexual harassment by a fictional Arkansas state employee (who is clearly a stand-in for Paula Jones), she describes being taken to a hotel room where Clinton exposed himself and told her to "kiss it", a story Hillary mulls over.
Would Bill have really said "Kiss it," just like that, as a command unaccompanied by flattery or self-deprecation? I could more easily imagine his saying, with some blend of feigned and sincere sheepishness, "Will you kiss it?" He was a confident man, yes, but didn't you have to be a brute to simply issue such a decree? And yet they'd known each other for a few minutes, and then he'd unfastened his pants and shown her his presumably erect penis. Had he not understood or not cared that she didn't want to see it? I thought how I HAD kissed Bill Clinton's penis, and far more than once, and usually without his asking. (pg 300)
There's also a particularly lurid passage about Bill giving Hillary a hand job while driving which I have a hard time believing Hillary, even as a sex-crazed twenty-something, would be stupid enough to not only go along with but encourage. They're both on the way to extremely promising careers, both have worked frantically and steadily since at least their early teens to get where they are (and that's in the book), and they'd handily chuck it out the window for a possible arrest/traffic accident, even in their respective 20-something love/sex-crazed states?
There's also post-menopausal Hillary, still sexually active, and having sex as President with her boyfriend, and great sex at that.
Were this not about a real life historical figure who is very much alive and this book is geared to be a bestseller, I'd say it's great to read uplifting sex scenes from a woman in her seventies in a culture that has far less of a problem with hearing about underaged teenagers having sex than they do about sex post menopause, or even in women and femmes of some indeterminate age, but you can believe it's far, far younger than it is for men/male-presenting people. But rather than go the we-all-know-who-this-is-but-it's-fictionalized route like the author apparently did with Laura Bush in her bestseller American Wife, she went the real-person-name-and-all route, and it's incredibly uncomfortable. This isn't something cribbed with warnings in a little corner of the internet, it's a bestselling author with a highly anticipated book with a lot of media attention. And that's distracting from the real story.
Because the real story isn't the sex Rodham's Hillary had, although that's shown (clearly) as part of her relationship to Bill and why he's different from the other men she's dated. It's positing that had Hillary Clinton not been bogged down by Bill, she would have won the 2016 Presidential election.
And to be sure, there's a lot of dominoes to fall here.
The Bill Clinton of Rodham has what we'd probably call today a "sex addiction", or at least an extremely unhealthy attitude towards sex that he likens to his fondness for junk food (on a date, he dips his french fries in his ice cream sundae, charming Hillary):
With our faces close together, I scrutinized him, and he added, "For as long as I can remember, even when I was just a kid, I've had a weakness for a nice figure. A girl in a skirt walks by, and I'm like a dog drooling over a bone. But it's--" He paused. "It's infatuation. Not love." His face remained a few inches above mine as he watched me absorb his words. "You and me," he said. "This isn't infatuation." (pg 53)
When she catches Bill cheating, she confronts him.
"For God's sake," I said, "we did it just last night. Am I not enough for you?"
He looked down as he said, "There's definitely something wrong with me. Because yeah, you and I made love last night, and it was wonderful. and I could have done it again right when we woke up in the morning and again before you left for work, and again at lunch and again now. It's the way I imagine it is for people who drink too much. It's a rarer moment that I'm NOT overwhelmed with how much I want to have sex than when I am. I'm thinking about doing it right now, with you."
"Don't get your hopes up."
"That's not what I meant. I just meant it's constant, and I hate this about myself. My male urges-- they make a fool out of me. That's been true since long before I met you. But if I wreck what you and I have, I'd rather die." (pgs 93 and 94)
To the author's credit, as I mentioned, Clinton's real life accusers/scandals are depicted, but fictionalized and given fictional names (as as he does not become President, somewhere we assume a promising intern barely in her twenties presumably gets to live the life she had planned).
The book posits that without Hillary by his side as a shrewd political mind and even silent running mate, Clinton can't ride out his scandals with the wife he did choose, a faint woman who breaks down in tears when interviewed with her husband about his infidelities and indiscretions. Hillary shreds the interview with a colleague:
"Her outfit is too Little House on the Prairie," Greg said. "She should be wearing a suit."
"And they're sitting too far apart," I said. There were probably three inches of space between them. "They need to represent a united front."
[...]
"He needs to let her speak for herself," Greg said. "She should be saying all of this, not him."
Just then, the interviewer asked Sarah Grace if what Bill said was true.
Sarah Grace nodded. She said, "I felt sorry for the woman."
I winced. "Unfortunate choice of words."
In a soft voice, her eyes downcast, she added, "I think Bill's been a wonderful governor for the state of Arkansas."
"Jesus Christ," I said. "Did they not give her media training?"
She was so-- there was no other word for it-- weak. Bill needed an equal who'd act like even if he'd had affairs, so what? Because they both were sophisticated and tough and the only person he was answerable to was her and if she'd dealt with it, it was no one else's business; hell, maybe she'd had affairs, too. The American public would not, of course, like such a woman, but that didn't matter. He was the one running for office, and the reality was that a wife like that would probably win him sympathy votes.(pgs 219 and 220)
For a refresher, here is the real life counterpart to that interview, complete with Hillary Clinton.
That gets the point across that Hillary is vital to Bill's career, but it's a bit too winking and it's not the first time (we'll get to that).
At any rate, with Bill Clinton not in the running, George HW Bush handily (we assume, anyway) wins a second term (does Ross Perot exist in this universe?). In 1996, California governor Jerry Brown wins a single term, before he is defeated by John McCain in 2000, presumably in the Rodham universe, with the elder Bush granted a full two terms, his oldest son has no interest in running and after eight years America isn't ready for another Bush yet. Anyway, John McCain serves two terms and despite Hillary Rodham running for President in 2008, she's defeated by Barack Obama (dang, even in fiction!), who has the requisite two terms. Her opponent in the 2016 general election is Jeb Bush, as nearly twenty years was apparently enough between Bushes.
So is this a feminist book? Does it suggest that Hillary would've been better off in real life without Bill? That's a bit trickier. While in this universe Hillary wins the 2016 Presidential election (by not just the popular vote), it's not due to her greater competency and skill that she had time to refine when she wasn't in Bill Clinton's shadow. No, this Hillary is more openly and wisely appealing to the lowest instincts, usually in a racist way. She also rather calculatedly (even as a child) knows when to weaponize gender politics:
In the spring of seventh grade, I ran for student council president, as did four other raising eighth graders. When the list of candidates was posted on the bulletin board outside the principal's office, it didn't surprise me that all my opponents were boys, and if anything, it pleased me: I immediately understood the advantages conferred if students voted along gender lines. (pg 23)
The fact this Hillary gets a Senate career by stepping on a trail-blazing Black woman (the real life Carol Moseley Braun) in part because while she feels Braun is impressive "like Bill", she "doesn't realize how careful women have to be" when she turns up late for a fundraiser. Running over Braun costs this Hillary the support of her mentor, Gwen, a woman who urged her to leave Bill and was relieved when she did ("This is the best decision you've ever made. Now your life belongs to you again.") who is also Black. Hillary continues to step in it, cackling with a white colleague over Clarence Thomas being an "Oreo", and she manages to neglect any sense of intersectionality time and again:
Sally said, "And all these years I believed Americans were more racist than sexist."
"Did you really?" I said. "Given when the Fifteenth Amendment passed and when the Nineteenth did?"
(pg 282)
Ooof, that's not a good look for anyone.
But as much as I wanted to be president, I wanted a woman to be president-- I wanted this because women and girls were half the population and we deserved, as a basic human right and a means of ensuring justice, to be equally represented in our government. Yet it was hard to explain because no man had ever run for president for this reason; even Barack, who'd surely run in part of the racial justice version of it, had never to my knowledge articulated it as such. Some presidents cared about improving the world, and all of them had egos; but none of them had run because they hoped to gain entry to the highest office of power on behalf of an entire gender. Yes, I was me, Hillary, but I also was a vessel and a proxy. (pg 305)
I once told [colleague] Theresa the story of my friendship with Gwen, thinking that doing so would be cathartic, but instead I felt a renewed sadness. A few days later, Theresa gave me a memoir she'd read by a black woman who had grown up attending private schools where almost all the other students were white, and who had eventually become the first black law partner at a firm in Manhattan. Though Theresa didn't flag it, there was a passage where the woman described her difficulty having deep friendships with white women, how betrayed she'd feel by their casual comments that dismissed the complexity of race for her. I read the passage several times. (pg 326)
It was an interesting touch that this Hillary makes that note and still doesn't appear to get it. In her inaugural address, she thought of Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass, but Ida B Wells (nor Shirley Chisholm) aren't anywhere to be found.
She debates deploying Trump, fearful that his endorsement might make things uncomfortable with Obama (because even in this universe, Trump is a racist birther), but not only urges him to run hoping he'll distract Bill's voters (possibly a nod to the political rumor that the real life Hillary Clinton wanted either Cruz or Trump to be the nominee as either would be easier to beat than Jeb), but is willing to appear on stage with him.
And Rodham's Trump is quite the concoction. A fictional version of him is difficult for obvious reasons, but this appears to be a far more self-reflecting and formal Trump, who coins Hillary "Hardball Hillary" (does he even do "positive" nicknames for people? Ever?) and declares Bill Clinton should never be President because he's a dog, and Trump knows this because he's "like that, too" and "men like us, we love women, and that's great" but "you can't have threesomes with models when you're president" which given that this Trump earlier in the interview reflects he'd make a better candidate than Hillary is confusing, but also at least accurate to the real person, such as he is.
What's also interesting is how many times real world events still occur. Hillary's infamous "baking cookies" snark appears not during the 1992 primary when Bill is running, but instead on the campaign trail in 2004. Trump's line about Mexico and "not bringing their best" and his other racist rants from his speech announcing his run for President in this universe take place as he formally endorses Hillary for President and she has to scramble to refute (but ultimately has no problem), to which Trump caps off that she has to say that, she's a politician and has to toe the line, but he however is a star, and you can do anything you want (yes, one of the infamous lines from the Access Hollywood video).
Interestingly, we get an appearance from Vince Foster. If that names rings a bell but you can't quite remember, Foster was a childhood friend of Bill's and a long-time colleague of the Clintons who later worked in the administration and who succumbed to the massive stress of working in the White House and being on a new antidepressant (with no therapy or supervision) and died by suicide and whose death, despite being thoroughly investigated by Republicans and officially deemed a suicide, still comes up in "Clinton body count" conspiracies. But it's not actually Vince Foster (by name) who turns up in the book.
Some rumors have claimed Hillary and Foster were having an affair. In Rodham, Hillary has an "emotional affair" (they can't bring themselves to do anything more physically than hug and hold hands, as he's still married) with a colleague who later dies by suicide. His death is, as Foster's is, politicized and made even uglier. Hillary sadly notes she lost him three times: when she had to end the affair, when he died, and when he was made unrecognizable by her political enemies. A lot of anti-Hillary sentiment in Rodham is taken from real life, but with an added edge, when you consider that this Hillary doesn't have the trappings of a marriage and a child and considerably less political experience (lest we forget, the real Hillary was the First Lady of Arkansas and First Lady of the United States before she ever ran for office herself).
While no one chants "Lock her up" at a rally, Bill Clinton finds himself surrounded by "Shut her up" chants which honestly sound pretty laughably quaint by comparison, but this Hillary and her campaign take them seriously enough to try to get Bill to stop them. Also, one of Clinton's accusers comes forward and notes that she didn't like Hillary, but she hated Bill and she repeatedly said she really wishes Trump would run, which is presumably the book's version of the morally despicable, Steve Bannon-backed Trump decision to have a press conference with several of Bill Clinton's accusers.
A point I kept coming back to is the fact not only did Rodham's Hillary decide not to marry Bill, she decided not to marry at all. No find a partner that would work with her, no finding a partner that would let her shine (yes, a male partner letting a female partner shine is absolutely possible in the vague past; Julia Child's life story comes to mind), no nothing. Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin once likened Bill Clinton to Teddy Roosevelt, with his need to be "the bride at the wedding, the baby at the christening, and the corpse at the funeral" and naturally such a person would take shine from Hillary's ambitions. This Hillary ends up with someone, a loving partner who is happy to play second fiddle and be in the background, but not until the end of the book, and he's in part a set-up by her campaign to prove her heterosexuality (but they end up falling in love for real anyway). This suggests a troubling concept, that there is no way to "have it all", that for women, a family/relationship and a career must be two separate things to be successful.
The book is evenhanded about "that's just the way it is", too:
"I don't know if this is pathetic or conceited," I said. "But I always hoped a man would fall in love with me for my brain."
Again, [college friends] Phyllis and Nancy exchanged a glance. Phyllis's voice was kind as she said, "Hillary, no man falls in love with a woman's brain." (pg 36)
At lunch, she [a political donor], too, encouraged me to run for the Illinois House or Senate-- she said, "Down the line, you'd make a terrific governor"-- and when I demurred, she said, "I'm curious if you know this. The vast majority of men run for election because they decide they want to, and the vast majority of women run only when someone else suggests it."(pg 179)
Far more interesting is before history goes alternative. The love story, at least initially, between Hillary and Bill is genuinely charming (minus the gratuitous salacious prose). It points out clearly why Hillary would be attracted to him and feel finally validated. He calls out her belittling father, sniffs at her previous romantic failures (one fellow student she thought she was dating awkwardly tells her that he really enjoys discussing theology with her, making it clear they're just studymates; when Hillary recounts the story, Bill laughs and dismisses him as a pretentious fool), and his charisma makes her feel flattered he'd picked her.
As we left the party around one in the morning, Nick himself, who was clearly drunk, yelled after us, "Try not to actually fall in love, because I don't think it's legal for the president of the United States to be married to the Supreme Court justice."
Over his shoulder, Bill called back, "Then how about if I don't aim any higher than the U.S. Court of Appeals?" (pg 58)
She notes with wonder the novelty of his intelligence sharpening hers, and sends a message to a friend that reads "I found a man that loves my brain! Stop the presses!"
It's easier than to understand (if we take this as fact, with a big grain of salt) that this must've been what the real life Hillary felt, and to understand why she made the choices she did. Again, a book with this level of candor (although perhaps not this level of sexual detail) and running it just straight through her life, no alt history, would've been absolutely fascinating. Even with two Presidential runs, an active social media presence, and several bestselling memoirs, she's still a cipher to many, something that in her last memoir, she ponders what exactly she has to do to make people see and believe her.
And if this book's Hillary comes out far differently in her life than the actual one did, the book's Bill doesn't make out well. Rather than a generally popular President (at the time) whose legacy was considerably (and arguably unfairly) burnished by the events of the new century who still gets to be a political operative twenty years out of two terms in the highest office, this Clinton bitterly dropped his political career after the scandals took down his Presidential dreams, only to pick it up as a sort of lark many decades later, bored with Silicon Valley sex parties and presumably a string of mistresses, of yoga and veganism and plastic surgery and denied the ultimate prize by the one who got away (although the book depicts a rather glum 2005 reunion; Hillary assumes it's a tryst and is excited, but Bill turns her down for his much, much younger mistress and only wants her as a political operative, and they angrily part ways).
What is the point of speculative history? Perhaps the fact this book doesn't have a pat answer to Hillary's story and it's more convoluted is actually a history lesson in and of itself, as it requires us to consider the factors that set up the environment to secure her win in the book. Examining the political landscape and what could've been and what wasn't is a fairly complex tapestry. So much of history particularly in a campaign can rest on a moment, on a split-second decision, a speech, a good interview.
Maybe that's at least part of the point of speculative history, to get us to consider the little things that might have been different.
Notable: In the "A Little Too Winking" Department!
While watching Bill announce his candidacy in the 1992 Presidential election, Hillary is struck by "what-ifs":
It was undeniably surreal to sit alone in downtown Chicago and see Bill in Little Rock, setting in motion his lifelong dream and a plan in which I'd once believed I'd play an integral part. Had it been nothing more than a youthful illusion that our meeting was fated, that we'd found in each other something unique? I tried to image myself outside the Old State House instead of Sarah Grace. I owned no dresses like the one she was wearing, preferring suits, but was there a version of me that existed in a parallel universe who would by this point have absorbed the customs of Arkansas, including its fashion? If I married Bill, would I now be Hillary Clinton? Hillary Rodham-Clinton? (pg 194)
Similar feelings rise from Obama's victory speech:
What, I wondered as Sasha clasped her father's hand, was it like to get both, to have a family AND be elected president? All his predecessors had, too, except James Buchanan and, 140 years later, Jerry Brown, though Jerry's girlfriend had acted as first lady. Even Grover Cleveland, who'd been elected as a single man, had during his first term married the twenty-one-year-old daughter of a friend and eventually had five children. (pg 284)
But for [Michelle Obama], now what? I'd read that prior to taking a leave from her executive hospital job, she'd earned almost double the $175,000 salary her husband and I made as senators, and, as first lady, she would be paid nothing. I knew I shouldn't project, but did she really want to oversee White House Christmas decorating, to be Barack's accoutrement? Maybe the opportunity to eviscerate ugly stereotypes just by existing made the personal sacrifice worth it, or maybe influencing policy through back channels didn't seem to her like a second-rate option. But seeing her onstage was strangely like watching a younger version of myself-- a taller, far more glamorous, African American version-- and I wasn't envious. Or I was envious, watching as she and Barack exchanged kisses on the cheek before she escorted their daughters backstage and he began his speech. But not envious of her. I was envious of him. (pg 285)
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This book was published in mid 2020, but it has some content that came up during the 2020 elections that would occur clearly after the author had written it and after publication.
My Republican opponent was indeed Jeb Bush, and the media followed his example on behaving as if his being five years my junior put us in two different generations. There were rumors that I had Parkinson's and a traumatic brain injury and syphilis, and even Jeb himself, who was routinely congratulated in the press for his impeccably WASPy manners, regularly declared that I seemed "worn out." (pgs 411 and 412)
To be fair, plenty of that is taken from the 2016 election. But the Trump campaign and Trump himself frequently accused Joe Biden, only four years older than Donald Trump, of being senile among other things unfitting him for office (and don't forget "sleepy Joe"). Having "low-energy Jeb" deliver the jibe is a nice ironic touch, though.
My inauguration took place on January 20, 2017. I wore a gray suit with-- to symbolize the melding of blue and red America-- a purple collar and a purple shell beneath it.(pg 415)
Recall the purple theme in fashion at the 2021 inaugural festivities, showing (mostly Democrats') willingness to stand together with Republicans, who overwhelmingly earlier that month supported a domestic terrorist attack on the Capital that left several dead in favor of overthrowing the democratic process that would require the last Republican President who incited the attack to leave office.
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Similar to "Pokemon GO to the polls!" and "Whip/Nae Nae" is Rodham's Hillary uttering "on fleek" to about the same cringing reaction.
More interestingly, this Hillary does an event with a podcast that sounds a lot like Joe Rogan, and is clearly meant to be a cross between her real life "Between Two Ferns" appearance and Saturday Night Live cameo, if either involved Joe Rogan or someone acting like him at the time. After a barrage of horrifying, inappropriate questions ("Have you ever borrowed a tampon from Nancy Pelosi?" "Did women have orgasms in the seventies?"), Hillary tells off the comedian "Danny Danielson" and walks off the show. While traditional media takes a standard approach, social media is, well, social media:
Among the online headlines in the hours after we left the studio: "Hillary's Meltdown"; "Hillary's Tantrum"; "Hillary's Tirade"; "Hillary's Worst Week Ever?"; "Shillary Yells at Comedian." And from the New York Times: "For Some, Hillary Can Do No Right." Often, it was the pseudo-impartiality of the Times that rankled me the most, its veneer of elegance and restraint as it led readers to disapprove (for some!). I love reading Times articles that weren't about me, which only made its negative portrayal sting more.
But also: Particularly on Twitter and Facebook, women were celebrating my response to Danny. Within twenty-four hours, two videos sampling my longest remarks had gone viral. In one, a bald black man in Atlanta sang a gospel version of my words while wearing a pink three piece suit, and in the other, a lithe young white woman from Dallas, outfitted in a blond wig and pantsuit, writhed, gyrated on a beige carpet, and lip-synced my words over a techno beat. (pg 333)
Okay, people probably shouldn't be lauded for writing plausible-sounding meme culture in the 2020s, but credit where it's due and all that.
Final Grade: B-
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