Novelist Curtis Sittenfeld will be recasting Hillary Clinton’s life in a bizarro world where Ms. Rodham might have met but never married Bill. The same Bubba who softened her hard heart, we’re to understand, hardened the last glass ceiling over her head.
We won’t soon shake this cultural icon we’ve inherited, Hillary as fallen folk hero. We’re all paying the ultimate tax of her wifely burden, I guess, and in the wake of world historical upsets like Trump’s election, the restless imagination, resisting an unseemly reality, winds toward alternate history.
But Sittenfeld really is the perfect author to craft Hillary Rodham’s shadow life. She and Hillary are a lot alike, in my experience of the best-selling author and world-famous, ubiquitous political figure. Since Sittenfeld’s debut Prep landed on everyone’s “must read” list in 2005, its deliciously sharp pre-Recession voyeurism has turned into a hollow indictment of the one-percent. Her next two books—Man of My Dreams, about an intense young woman’s world within, and American Wife, a thinly veiled Laura Bush—prepared her for writing Hillary’s redo. Her latest, a modernized (but why?) Pride and Prejudice entitled Eligible, deals with marital decision-making—the area of Hillary’s first great misstep and most consequential failure, after all.
What to make, now, of the unnamed Clinton project, due in 2019? It can’t be too hard to predict the triumphal twist and turns of (working title) Blame Bill. The seeds and saplings of a novelistic, or operatic really, melodrama are all there. (The movie version, Rodham, meanwhile isn’t getting made.)
Gail Sheehy more or less portentously concluded the 1992 Vanity Fair profile that would grow into a biography—”Maybe the next presidential election, or several more down the line, the other Clinton will be on the ticket. As Hillary told a Los Angeles audience recently, ‘We’ll have a woman president by 2010.’ Would she consider running? she was pressed. ‘We’ll talk later.'”
Hillary coyly declined, at the time, to say she what she meant: “And it will be ME!” Friends told Sheehy, and other biographers, early and often that Hillary—Bill less so—was destined practically from birth to be a political star: President? Sure! As a young girl, she domineered her neighborhood playmates, telling all the other kids and parents in the Chicago suburb of her youth what greatness lay ahead.
There would have been no President William Jefferson Clinton without her, so the story goes. And, if we’re to believe the old gas pump jockey ex-boyfriend joke (Hillary recognized an old flame pumping gas in Illinois, Bill said, “If you’d married him you’d be working at a gas station,” to which she clipped, “If I’d married him, he’d be president”), she knew it too.
Could Bill Clinton have refashioned himself from the wreckage, after failing to reclaim the governor’s mansion in 1980, without Hillary’s sacrifice: her maiden name and natural hair color? If she hadn’t duly done it up those next two years—ceded an independence already under siege—there might have been no Bubba in chief, no highly profitable pay-for-play, no bimbo wars nor any nationally known Billary to speak of.
We know how instrumental her feminist debasement was to his ascent. And we’re meant imagine now, with Curtis Sittenfeld’s narrative guidance, just how far hitching her wagon to the “eternal boy” dragged her down. Smart women do make that mistake, believing they need the kernel of a Great Man to apply their talents to tending.
Sittenfeld’s task will be reimagining Hillary Rodham herself the Great Man. Not necessarily single, but not overshadowed. She’ll gift her the foresight or the fateful intervention, as a second-year law student, to choose a stodgier boyfriend instead—Jeff Shields, the Harvard man with whom she shared lovely-sounding weekends on the Cape, or David Rupert, the beau she dumped for Bill.
Just as Hillary Rodham’s salary covered her young family while the wunderkind won over Arkansan constituents, Rupert’s or Shields’ corporate lawyering could have fueled her political career. Had they settled in Illinois and she started out a community organizer in Chicago. A soulful foil to her hardworking husband, she’d be the caring and charismatic one of the couple—the one chasing down extramarital excitements, like running for office.
She’d win Alan Dixon’s Senate seat in 1992, mount a failed campaign for the presidency at the end of her second term, and then lose renomination to a promising young upstart and her former protege in Illinois politics: Barack Obama. In four years, the young usurper would reach higher. He’d pass her over for vice-presidential nominee, but, fearing retribution, would offer former Senator Rodham her pick of cabinet positions.
And, eight long years later, the former senator and former secretary of state, with no reputational baggage beyond scandals of her own devise, will take her shot! Recently widowed and a new grandmother, she’ll approximate the picture of sympathy in natural gray hair and hip yet matronly glasses. Her adult son Chandler, a public school principal, his lovely wife and mewling baby will join her on key campaign stops in her late husband’s stead. She never did take his name.
Everyone who pulled the sheets over her head on the morning of November 9th and softly wept while indulging denial, frantically flitting through what-ifs, knows this next worn-out line, also the novel’s premise: Surely, surely, as the fever dream fades, surely she would have won…
