What if Hillary had become president? Curtis Sittenfeld on rewriting Clinton's life
Even now, I’m one of those people who can’t bring herself to say: “If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election … ” Because, to me, she didwin. She received nearly 2.9m more votes than Donald Trump, but of course Trump received more electoral votes. So instead I say: “If Hillary Clinton had become president” or “If the outcome of the 2016 election had been different … ” Finishing the sentence requires less finessing on my part; it is perfectly clear: “… I would not have written a Hillary novel.”
If Hillary had become president, I wouldn’t have needed to. Instead of watching in real time as our country becomes a more racist, sexist, xenophobic and homophobic place, Americans would have had a leader committed not just to equality among people but also to addressing climate change, gun law reform and healthcare. And it seems equally unprovable and indisputable that her response to a global pandemic would have been vastly different – science-based, measured, compassionate.
But instead we live in this world, not that one, and, for my own sake, I did need to write a novel in which the 2016 US presidential election unfolded differently. I’m 44, and it was only a few years ago, after well over three decades of writing fiction, that I realised I have devoted much of my life to this creative act for two reasons above all: to entertain myself and to soothe myself. Writing Rodham was definitely an example of the latter. Plus, it tapped into my fascination with politics, fame, and the discrepancy between our public and private selves – all themes I first explored in my 2008 novel American Wife, which was a fictionalised retelling of the life of Laura Bush.
But where American Wife mostly embellishes the real or historical timeline, Rodham creates a parallel universe. What I didn’t know when I embarked on writing in March 2017 was how much I’d teach myself – or perhaps I should say how much Hillary would teach me. These are some of the lessons I learned:
Multi-decade rumour mill notwithstanding, it’s hard to find examples of things Hillary has done wrong.The false accusations levelled at her range from murky acts of financial malfeasance, to bonkers conspiracy theories about paedophilia, to persistent suggestions that she mishandled email when she was secretary of state. On close examination, what’s striking about these supposed scandals is that they either have no relationship to reality or she’s being accused of something that I (and admittedly I’m not a lawyer) would not at first glance understand to be inappropriate, let alone illegal. After reading multiple accounts of the controversy around “Whitewater”, Bill and Hillary’s late 1970s real estate investment, I still would struggle to cogently summarise the sequence of events to another human. This murkiness contrasts with the events that currently unfold on a weekly basis in the White House – consider the New York Times headline on 21 April “Trump (the Company) Asks Trump (the Administration) for Hotel Relief”– that prompt me to sincerely wonder, how can this possibly be legal?
I don’t see Hillary as saintly, but the two damning titbits that emerged about her in my research that have stayed with me are actually absurdly insignificant. The first is that, according to biographer Carl Bernstein, in 1993 the Clintons travelled together to St Louis, Missouri. Hillary told an aide to leave Bill’s briefcase aboard Air Force One, but when Bill later asked for it, Hillary supposedly told him: “Your staff always does that ... They don’t serve you well.” This is not, I’d venture to say, grounds for locking her up. Nor is the other scrap of scandal: New York Times reporter Amy Chozick, who covered the 2016 campaign, describes in her book Chasing Hillary how, at events, members of Hillary’s staff sometimes confiscated supporters’ homemade signs and instructed them to hold up mass-produced campaign signs instead. Then again, given the ease with which one can find photos that show supporters holding homemade placards and flags, this practice doesn’t seem to have been widespread – and in any event, it’s safe to assume it wasn’t Hillary herself doing the confiscating.
The disparity between the vitriolic criticism Hillary has faced and who she actually is seems to be so great that it reminds me of that optical illusion – itself a sexist binary – where from one angle the image looks like a beautiful young woman and from another angle like a hag. Many Americans perceive Hillary as either irredeemably corrupt or heroic, with little apparent attention given to the possibility that she’s neither. Sometimes while writing, I thought that if, in a parallel universe, I ended up sitting next to her at a dinner party and she were exactly the same person but instead of going into politics was a university president or corporate executive, I would be dazzled by her. “That woman is so smart,” I’d think. “She’s so tough and interesting and impressive.”If Bill Clinton had wanted to marry me in 1975, I’d have accepted.When I decided that the premise of my novel would be “What if Hillary hadn’t married Bill?”, it wasn’t because I find Bill loathsome. I do find him very flawed – some of his behaviour has been disturbing at best – but my main goal was to examine chance, fate, free will and the notion of parallel universes or other, unlived lives. As Hillary has mentioned publicly more than once, in the early 1970s, she was initially reluctant to accept Bill’s marriage proposals. Indeed, as an epigraph for Rodham, I chose these lines from her 2017 memoir What Happened: “My marriage to Bill Clinton was the most consequential decision of my life. I said no the first two times he asked me. But the third time, I said yes. And I’d do it again.”
It seems facile and preposterous to claim that if only she hadn’t married him, she’d be president today. On the one hand, if almost anything in 2016 had happened differently, that seems a likely outcome, but on the other hand, who knows? And while I used this particular marital departure from reality for fiction, Bill’s charms aren’t lost on me. In fact, in June 2017, I tweeted a picture of his almost thousand-page memoir along with the comment: “VERY unexpected outcome of writing my Hillary novel – I myself am now in grave danger of falling in love with Bill.”
In his autobiography My Life, Bill is a funny, self-deprecating raconteur with an excellent eye for colourful details (especially of the southern fried variety) and an apparent fondness for almost everyone he has ever met. Plus, the photos of him and Hillary from back then, along with the ones in her memoir Living History, are downright swoony. Though the couple are far less polished-looking than now, she’s pretty and he’s dashing, and in pictures from their wedding, they gaze at each other
with adoring intensity. In the present day, it’s never a foregone conclusion that an ambitious man will be smitten with an ambitious woman; 50 years ago, it was all the more notable.
And though I’ve never met either Clinton, his in-person charisma is legendary. In fact, in response to my tweet about Bill, one of my Twitter followers shared that someone she knew had seen him in a London department store shortly after the news of his affair with Monica Lewinsky had emerged. The woman approached, planning to tell him he was a national embarrassment. Instead, as they shook hands, she exclaimed, “I love you!”
The Clintons just might have a good marriage.In late January 1992, when Bill’s first presidential campaign hung in the balance due to the cabaret singer Gennifer Flowers’s recent allegation that she’d had a 12-year affair with him, he and Hillary sat for a joint interview with the news show 60 Minutes. “I think most Americans would agree that it’s very admirable that you’ve stayed together,” said the journalist Steve Kroft. “That you’ve worked your problems out and that you’ve seemed to reach some sort of understanding and arrangement.”
Kroft and the Clintons were in a hotel suite in New Hampshire, the Clintons on a loveseat across from their interlocutor, and Bill quickly responded: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. You’re looking at two people who love each other. This is not an arrangement or an understanding. This is a marriage. That’s a very different thing.”
When this interview aired, I watched it in my boarding school dorm; I was 16 and had never had a boyfriend. I’ve now been married for 12 years, and the pertinent question doesn’t seem to be, is the Clintons’ marriage an arrangement? The question is, what marriage isn’t?
Yes, I understand that Kroft was essentially saying: “Do you not love each other but stay together anyway because of your shared ambition?” But this question itself seems simplistic, a pretence that the default mode of marriage is happily ever after. I don’t know any couple for whom it’s this easy.
I believe that the Clintons genuinely enjoy each other’s company, are genuinely interested in each other’s opinions, have considered divorce and made the choice not to pursue it. At the risk of sounding cynical, it’s possible such a dynamic is about the best any of us can hope for. I sometimes think about how their marriage outlasted that of Bill’s vice-president, Al Gore, and his former wife Tipper. Little information was public about the Gores’ marriage, whereas I know as much about the Clintons’ marriage as I do about my own. Or maybe – bear with me here – I don’t. Maybe every marriage is unknowable except to the people inside it.In the United States, it’s rare to hear the unfiltered voices of female politicians. More than a year after it had aired, I learned about the existence of a 2016 campaign podcast created by the Clinton Foundation. Called With Her, it was hosted by a quintessentially podcasty guy named Max Linsky – a smart, casual Brooklynbased white man – and featured interviews with Hillary, Bill, Chelsea, vicepresidential nominee Tim Kaine, and assorted campaign staff members.
From the first seconds of listening to it, I was aware of something weird and unfamiliar in its tone, though it took a few minutes to pinpoint what: Hillary was not being addressed with reflexive scepticism and cynicism, and she therefore did not need to respond defensively. The assumption was not that she was a power-hungry Machiavellian. The assumption was that she was a likable hard worker who cares about the American people. Even more disorienting: the person giving her the benefit of the doubt was male.
As research, I read many articles and watched many news segments from the autumn of 2016, before the election, and there is a weary undertone to almost all of them, a kind of irritation that Hillary will be the first female president when she’s so, you know, polarising and baggage-laden. Her victory is both foregone and irksome. This undertone would seem laughably wide of the mark were it not for the fact that so many Americans have paid such a high price for the ignorance.
Also as research, I listened to audiobooks by all the female senators running for president in 2020: Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren. They narrate their own books, and, once again, to listen to their literal voices was to feel a heartening disorientation. They got to speak for as long as they wanted without interruption, tell their own stories, and present themselves, instead of being presented through the lens of America’s profound ambivalence about, or outright aversion to, women in power. Of course I understand that these kinds of books are a form of campaigning, but I’m not convinced that being in charge of the way you are portrayed makes your portrayal inherently false.
Based on my remarks here, a person could be forgiven for thinking I wrote Rodham because I’m such an ardent fan of Hillary. This isn’t quite right. I am a fan of Hillary, but, to answer a question I’ve already been asked many times, I don’t think she’ll read the book, and if she does, I don’t necessarily think she’ll like it. It’s not a straightforward love letter. The character I’ve created makes personal and professional tradeoffs. She’s not perfect, and the character of Bill is (spoiler alert) even less so. Also, the sex scenes are way too detailed.
I’d argue that it’s less that my novel grew out of my admiration for Hillary and more that my admiration grew out of my research about her. For my entire adulthood, she has been not merely a public figure but a cultural touchstone. Many Americans still say they don’t know her, yet she’s shown us over and over who she is: how strong and capable, how caring and complicated. We just have to choose to see her.
• Rodham is published by Doubleday in July and as an audiobook on 19 May. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Many see Hillary as either irredeemably corrupt or heroic – little attention is given to the possibility she’s neither