Rodham

Chapter 1

1970

The first time I saw him, I thought he looked like a lion. He was six foot two, though I knew then only that he was tall. And in fact, his height seemed even greater because he was big-­tall, not skinny-­tall. He had broad shoulders and a large head and his hair was several inches longer than it would be later, which drew attention to its coppery color; his beard was the same shade. I suppose I thought he looked like a handsome lion, but even from a distance, he seemed full of himself in a way that canceled out his handsomeness. He seemed like a person who took up more than his share of oxygen.

This sighting took place in Yale Law School s student lounge, in the fall of 1970 my second year of law school and his first. I was with my friend Nick, and Bill was speaking in his loud, husky, Southern-­accented voice to a group of five or six other students. With great enthusiasm, he declared, And not only that, we grow the biggest watermelons in the world!

Nick and I looked at each other and began laughing. Who is that? I whispered.

Bill Clinton, Nick whispered back. He s from Arkansas, and that s all he ever talks about. The next thing Nick told me was actually, at Yale Law School, less notable than Bill s being from Arkansas. He was a Rhodes scholar.

After I d been accepted at both Harvard and Yale, I d decided where to go using a rule I d established for myself at such an early age probably in third or fourth grade that I had trouble remembering a time when I hadn t abided by it. Though I d never discussed it with anyone, I thought of it as the Rule of Two: If I was unsure of a course of action but could think of two reasons for it, I d do it. If I could think of two reasons against it, I wouldn t. Situations arose, of course, where there were two or more reasons both for and against something, but they didn t arise that frequently.

Should I, as a high school freshman, take Latin? Because I d heard the teacher was

Curtis Sittenfeld is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, Sisterland, and Eligible, and the story collection You Think It, I ll Say It, which have been translated into thirty languages. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, of which she was the 2020 guest editor. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and Vanity Fair, and on public radio s This American Life.

[Curtis] Sittenfeld s Rodham descends like an avenging angel. Here, in the pages of this alternate history about Hillary Rodham Clinton, is the story not of What Happened but of What Could Have Happened.  This isn t just fiction as fantasy; it s fiction as therapy. The Washington Post

[A] moving, morally suggestive, technically brilliant book that made me think more than any other in recent memory about the aims and limits of fiction . . . By fanning out alternate narratives . . . [Rodham] asks us to imagine a different world. . . . And from there, what a short excruciating, hopeful leap it is to: Everything could be different. NPR

Sittenfeld at her best. The Wall Street Journal

Gritty, gripping. Chicago Tribune

Deviously clever . . . [Rodham] doesn t have an overt political agenda; it s less concerned with lionizing or vilifying Hillary than with complicating our notions of her. Sittenfeld s Hillary is both a player in the Game of Thrones and a romance novel heroine. . . . She s whoever she wants to be. O: The Oprah Magazine

Delectably discussable, a book tailor-made for book clubs. USA Today

A stay-up-all-night plot . . . a captivating and durable story containing rooms within rooms. Rodham turns into a high-speed bildungsroman about a woman of formidable intellect and self-insight. . . . It s both an enticement and a challenge. Los Angeles Times

A wild, witty, provocative mishmash of history, real and imagined. People

Sittenfeld movingly captures Hillary s awareness of her transformation into a complicated public figure. . . . Often funny, mostly sympathetic, and always sharp. Publishers Weekly
 
Daring, seductive, and provocative . . . [an] exhilaratingly trenchant, funny, and affecting tale . . . Sittenfeld orchestrates a gloriously cathartic antidote to the actual struggles women presidential