Curtis Sittenfeld’s ‘Rodham’ imagines a different ‘Hillary’

Gulf Today Report

Over the past few years, author Curtis Sittenfeld has gotten to know Hillary Clinton in a way uniquely suited for a novelist — by writing a work of fiction about her.

“I was definitely an admirer of Hillary before I started the book, but writing from her perspective made me feel closer to her,” Sittenfeld, whose “Rodham” comes out Tuesday.

“I realise that closeness is NOT mutual — we’ve never met. But she feels very familiar to me now in terms of the trajectory of her life, her relationships, her syntax, so when I see clips of her or hear her voice, I think, ‘Oh, that s my Hillary.’”

Other highlights from the recent interview with Sittenfeld: On why she wrote “Rodham”:

Two things made me write this book. First, in early 2016, an editor at Esquire asked if I’d like to write a short story from Hillary’s perspective as she accepted the Democratic nomination for president. I had declined to write essays about Hillary — I didn’t feel I had any new analysis to contribute — but fiction gave me the chance to ask not “What do the American people think of Hillary?” but “What does Hillary think of the American people?”

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I also realised around the 2016 election, which I was devastated by, that schoolchildren who knew Hillary was running for president often literally didn’t know that Bill Clinton existed. I wondered if the outcome of the election would have been different if adults were similarly able to see her as independent from him.

“Rodham” is definitely without question a novel — the great majority of events in it are made-up. I feel that it’s important for me to say that if anyone wants to read a definitive account of Hillary’s life, they should read either of her two memoirs or perhaps the non-fiction accounts “A Woman in Charge” by Carl Bernstein or “Chasing Hillary” by Amy Chozick. “Rodham” is an act of imagination, creativity, and, yes, to some extent wishful thinking.

“If Hillary wants to read the book, she’s very welcome to and I’d be happy to hear her feedback (even if she thinks parts of it are preposterous), and if she doesn’t want to, I don’t blame her,” she added.