Courtesy of Random House
Curtis Sittenfeld, Rodham
If Hillary Clinton had become president in 2016, Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel, Rodham, would not exist. She would have no reason to write it. The election cycle and the years that followed it demonstrated the entrenched misogyny in America's patriarchal society, after the most qualified woman presidential candidate in history lost to a man with no political experience. The totality of it all led the New York Times bestselling author, who recently moved to Minneapolis, to base her latest on a provocative thought experiment: What if Hillary and Bill Clinton never got married?
Sittenfeld is no stranger to drawing inspiration from American politics or rewriting narratives. In addition to her mid-aughts breakthrough Prep, her work includes American Wife, a fictionalization of the life of Laura Bush, and Eligible, a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice. But going the route of The Butterfly Effect on the life story of a politician whose name alone can instantly stir up a visceral reaction among certain people?
"I realize that some readers probably don't want to be in the same room with this book, and then others, it's their dream come true," she says. How much of Bill Clinton's legacy was a liability for Hillary's presidential campaign, and in what ways was she an asset to his? Independent from Bill, this story allows Hillary to be recognized on her own terms.
What she learned while researching her previous books became useful with Rodham. "If there's factual information you're trying to find for fiction, it usually is findable, and you just kind of have to be persistent. Sometimes it means poking around the internet intensely, and sometimes it means finding people who can answer your questions who have expertise in what you're describing." That even meant texting her aunt, who was a freshman at Wellesley College while Hillary was a senior, to determine if an F-bomb would be realistic in 1970s dialogue.
The shape of this book began when she found she had more to say after writing a short story for Esquire from the perspective of Hillary accepting the Democratic nomination for president.
“It was a very interesting exercise for me because I was asking the question, not what do the American people think of Hillary, but what does Hillary think of the American people,” she explains. “I was invited to write essays about Hillary and I hadn't wanted to because I didn't think I had anything new to say, but thinking about who she is in a fictional way was to me a much more complicated, interesting question."
The book is divided into different eras of Hillary's life, beginning with her Wellesley commencement speech, where she goes off script and sets the stage for her political career. After a meet-cute with Bill Clinton in their twenties at Yale, they begin dating (one scene he even plays the saxophone naked to her), but the timeline branches off from reality when infidelity emerges in their relationship. Sound familiar?
"I had this realization, that for schoolchildren who had known that Hillary Clinton was running for president, a lot of them literally didn't know that Bill existed. I just became very intrigued by the idea of how the election might have played out differently if adults also saw Bill and Hillary as totally unconnected to each other,” Sittenfeld says.
When fiction explores alternative realities, it usually says something more about the state of our own world. By giving us a counterfactual to our reality, it can reveal the flaws in our own.
Rodham, told from a first person perspective, paints intimate moments in Hillary's private life in a way that only fiction can. It has a humanizing effect, complicating the person we think we know based on memoirs, headlines, and social media. The book is ponderous about the mysteries of love and attraction, the morality of the people we elect for the greater good, and how much one decision can impact the trajectory of our lives. It's a sharp critique of the double standard women politicians face, written with Sittenfeld's humorous, "unadorned" writing style.
In researching the book, Sittenfeld dived into Hillary's memoirs, as well as the memoirs of the female candidates who ran in 2020, to get a sense of their collective experiences.
"Of course, a political memoir is written to make the author or the candidate look good, but like, every time we leave the house we sort of make choices to make ourselves look good," she says. "I'm always surprised by how revealing they are, including, by the way, Amy Klobuchar's. I know about Amy Klobuchar's prom. I know about like her high school spring break. I know about her first date with her husband."
One part of the book recounts the lead-up to the Year of the Woman in 1992, that rose from the aftermath of Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against Justice Clarence Thomas. It is impossible to read without comparing it to Christine Blasey Ford's testimony against Justice Brett Kavanaugh and wonder how little has changed.
For so much of her life, Hillary Clinton became a symbol of what women could achieve, and by consequence a prism for people to see who they want to in her.
"People say, Oh, Hillary is unknowable, it's sort of like unknowable compared to what? Unknowable compared to Mitt Romney? Unknowable compared to Mike Bloomberg?" Sittenfeld says. "It's a very strange kind of demand that we make. I don't know what somebody being knowable means, or what even someone being authentic [means]. In the age of social media, there's plenty of fake authenticity out there."
She adds: “People said Hillary could never satisfyingly answer why she was running for president, and I think that women are asked to justify the mere choice to run, many, many more times than men are. I don't know what a satisfying answer to that question would ever be.”
While she's been staying at home, Sittenfeld has been reading Writers and Lovers by Lily King, listening to Jonathan Goldstein's check-ins from his Heavyweight podcast, and finding comfort in watching the new at-home episodes of SNL with her family. Needless to say, putting a book out during a pandemic has been a first. “I feel like the funny thing about publication is, it's sort of when your novel stops being yours, and then it goes into the world and people get to think what they think,” she says. "I know some people feel so anxious and distracted right now that they can barely read, period. Just to give people a pleasurable, entertaining reading experience feels very special.”
But does she think Hillary will read it?
“I think she is used to being the focus of all different kinds of attention, and I think that a novel doesn't loom so large in your life when you've been Secretary of State and run for president," she says. "If she did read it, I think I would suspect that maybe some parts show that I had done my research, and some would seem ludicrous to her, and I don't know what the proportions would be."
If you choose to, it could be the escape from reality you’ve been searching for.
