Something Lost, Something Gained

November 1, 2024
The former presidential candidate mines those moments and pet projects easily overlooked during the course of a high-profile career. Clinton has more former roles, titles, and experiences to account for and reflect on than most. In the opening pages of her latest memoir, she promises a series of conversational snippets that make it "feel like sitting with me at a dinner party." Thus, the net of content is cast wide--especially given the book's relatively short length--and jumps between her roles in both personal relationships and presidential administrations and her musings on issues facing America today, like political polarization, the repeal ofRoe v. Wade, and threats to democracy posed by Donald Trump. Readers expecting a new intimacy from Clinton will not find it here; her acknowledged "midwestern reticence" erects guardrails to keep her within her comfort zone. Occasionally, she cannot resist reminding readers of what she has been right about all along. Yet Clinton's understanding of her own aging and dwindling number of "tomorrows" stays some of the temptation to pontificate and prompts her to "open up," both in pursuing new professional contexts and in giving readers poignant, if small, windows into her personal grief, faith, and intentionality and investment in relationships. Unsurprisingly, persistence and resilience, as shown not only by courageous women worldwide but also by the United States, remain her thematic lighthouses. Rather than a vacant, Pollyannaish cheer, these twin drumbeats pound both above and beneath the book's subtext, marking a thought-provoking and motivating push-pull between Clinton's realism, anxiety, and optimism, no longer bound by the lenses and soundbites of campaigns and stump speeches and profoundly significant in the current political moment. A sincere if measured attempt to impart both wisdom and urgency.

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October 7, 2024
Former secretary of state Clinton (What Happened) mashes together impassioned arguments about what’s at stake in the 2024 election with heartfelt stories about her life in this confusing memoir. Addressing the reader as if sitting beside her “at a dinner party,” Clinton serves both “the broccoli and the ice cream”—the “political and personal.” Rather than the intended “rewarding meal,” this approach generates whiplash-inducing transitions, such as a leap from a poignant reflection on her late mother to an apocalyptic fantasy of a “Rip Van Reader” waking to Donald Trump’s second term, replete with “soldiers patrolling the streets” and “smog blanketing the sky.” Throughout, Clinton maintains a pointed focus on her 2016 rival, and the book sometimes reads as if written by a current presidential candidate, with tedious chapter-long dives into hot-button issues (abortion rights; children’s social media use). Pockets of inspiration emerge when Clinton recalls her career-long advocacy for women, and her personal anecdotes offer much needed levity (she named her “postmenopausal belly... ‘Beulah’”). Yet these moments are overshadowed by abundant needling at conservatives and progressives alike, from asserting that Trump’s inner circle “may well be on the Kremlin’s payroll” to admonishing anti–Gaza war protestors to educate themselves beyond “propaganda... served up by... the Chinese Communist Party on TikTok.” The overall effect is that of reading a compendium of rage-baiting, attention-grabbing headlines.