But she is fiercely loyal to her team, her friends, and her family, spending pages refuting critiques of her campaign staff and more pages still describing how Bill, Chelsea, and a cadre of girlfriends kept her sane in the worst moments of her life. Clinton is deeply self-critical, churning over her own small decisions and larger errors. Which doesn’t mean she evades responsibility. Hillary Clinton, you are forced to remember, is an actual person (and she comes across as a pretty nice one). That well of self-knowledge also means she offers herself some compassion, and brings readers into the big decision-making moments with her, and then into the brutal post-election excavation.

But in this book, she is just her, and she knows herself to her core – not an easy task for any of us, least of all a woman who has long been more a representative of some always-bigger thing than just a first lady, or just a politician trying to get elected, or just a pragmatic idealist trying to push progress an inch forward at a time. She details all of the ways in which she was told her to change (her name, her hair, her voice, her clothes, her positions), how “Hillary Clinton” went from being a person to an idea and finally a kind of sexist Rorschach test. We also get a more explicitly feminist one.Ĭlinton also cracks open a deep knowledge of self so often missing from politics – and from what we read about Hillary Clinton. She’s done with electoral politics, and this book was written in just a few months, so we get a far less cautious rendering of Clinton than we do in her previous memoir. But instead of leaving it at that – doing the very female thing of apologizing for everything, including those things which are not her fault – she offers up her own view from the ground, as someone who was there and has been in the public eye for most of her adult life. And we are seeing more of them pipe up now with the book’s publication, angry that this woman dares defy their personal preferences with her stubborn insistence that yes, she mattered, and yes, she will keep talking.Ĭlinton’s detractors would like her to say two simple words: “I’m sorry.” She does, of course, and has many times, and does it again and again in this memoir. We meet a few of them in her new book, What Happened, part memoir and part election post-mortem. A lot of people have told Hillary Clinton to shut up in her life.

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