The Path Not Taken: Curtis Sittenfeld on the Alternative Universe of Rodham
Hillary Clinton has written three fat memoirs. Lest anyone forget, thousands of her emails were leaked en masse to the public. But that vast source material, or a certain sense of Hillary fatigue (persistent cries from critics that she shut up and “go gently” from the spotlight), didn’t dissuade author Curtis Sittenfeld from adding to the Hillary canon with her new novel, Rodham. As you’ve probably have heard by now—because well-read women tend to greet a new Sittenfeld book with all the excitement of a Marvel movie premiere—the buzzy political fantasy, which is officially published today, imagines that Hillary falls for the burly, charismatic Bill Clinton and follows him back home to Arkansas—but doesn’t end up marrying him for reasons that seem all too believable.
“I move to fucking Fayetteville for you,” Rodham says in one strangely satisfying fight scene, “and you can’t even keep your pants zipped.”
Some people may think they know all they need to know about Hillary, but it was her longevity, and her ever-evolving public face, that first inspired Sittenfeld to start writing Rodham in March 2017. “Around the time of the 2016 election, I realized that school children who knew that Hillary was running for president often, literally, didn’t know that Bill existed,” Sittenfeld told Vogue by phone. The bestselling author of Prep, American Wife, and the short story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It recalled the story of a little girl she knows who put on a mini pantsuit and dressed as Hillary for Halloween a few years ago, but who was “flabbergasted” to recently discover that Clinton had been first lady too. “The Hillary she had been for Halloween was the woman who ran for president, not the woman who actually lived in the White House,” recalled Sittenfeld.
In real life—for many grown-ups, anyway—the two are impossible to separate, which may well have contributed to Clinton’s crushing electoral college loss. She was a feminist standard-bearer, who also, notably, remained at her husband’s side despite multiple claims of infidelity and sexual harassment.
“I was really fascinated by the idea of how the election might have turned out differently if adults didn’t see Bill and Hillary as so interconnected,” Sittenfeld said.
So Sittenfeld rewrote history (herstory?) with Rodham, an escapist alternate universe in which George W. Bush never becomes president; Donald Trump exists, but remains a mere Twitter charlatan; Clinton’s repeated sexual transgressions actually matter to voters; and, above all, Hillary chooses her own adventure, untethered from the fate of dutiful political wife.
“I knew from real life that she had turned down his proposals twice before accepting the third time, so it seemed like a plausible path not taken,” Sittenfeld said of her critical plot twist.
The Clintons themselves have made myth of Hillary’s initial refusals and Bill’s warning to his future wife that his career could subsume hers. “I really want you to marry me, but you shouldn’t do it,” he recalled telling her in his speech at Hillary’s history-making 2016 Democratic National Convention. Some might find that ominous, but not Sittenfeld. “Weirdly, it almost feels like a testament to their love,” she said, “like someone saying, ‘I’m going to be so bad for you’ right before you sleep together.” Leave it to Sittenfeld (who, in American Wife, gave us the mental image of a thinly veiled Laura Bush gazing down at a young W.’s head between her legs) to make the Clintons’ long and somewhat scandalous love story seem...kinda hot?
The “almost intolerable ecstasy” between them makes it hard for Sittenfeld’s Hillary to walk away from fictional Bill, a unicorn of a guy who actually loves her for her brain. The two sex each other silly from Yale Law School to San Francisco to the rural roads of Arkansas, where, in between campaign stops, Bill asks, “Will you take off your panties and let me touch you while I drive?” His “compulsive infidelity” is but one of five reasons the pragmatic Hillary tallies for dumping him; still, she barely makes it out of Fayetteville. “The margin between staying and leaving was so thin,” Hillary laments in Rodham. “Really, it could have gone either way.”
In 2008’s American Wife, Sittenfeld recast Laura Bush as a librarian turned first lady named Alice Lindgren who, like the real-life former first lady, gets into a car accident in high school that that leaves a classmate dead. But in Rodham, Sittenfeld leans all the way in to the Hillary-ness, not bothering to change names and using a full-bleed, sepia-toned vintage photo on the cover. In part, Sittenfeld said her reason for proverbially going there is “boring”: She worried it might have been confusing to change the Clintons’ names and the chain of events. But Sittenfeld is also keenly aware that Hillary is a polarizing figure, which makes a 473-page novel told by a first-person narrator based on her potentially polarizing too.
“The book didn’t have to be called Rodham, and it didn’t have to feature a picture of Hillary. That, obviously, was a choice,” she said. “Some readers will really embrace this book and some will want to avoid it. I think I was just feeling like, ‘Let me help steer you.’ Whichever path you want to take, I’m going to make it really clear for you.” When I ask Sittenfeld how she’s allowed to use Hillary’s maiden name and photo—is it because Clinton became so famous that it all falls under “fair use?” “I think the answer to your question is yes,” she replies. “The book did undergo legal review by my publisher and here we are.”
As the buzz builds for Rodham, I wonder how spending years seeped in Hillary’s brain shaped Sittenfeld’s own ideas about sexism as a female author in an industry that reveres male literary genius. “I seriously think (today anyway) that I may have written the great American novel,” the author tweeted in September 2019, while working on Rodham. “You might not realize it because I’m female and because the cover will probably be either a dress or a woman whose face you can’t see, so this is just an FYI.”
When I ask Sittenfeld if, six books into her career as one of the country’s foremost novelists, she feels her work won’t be received with the same reverence as a male counterpart, she recalls a panel she moderated last year with the author Sheila Heti. “She basically said that a lot of the work that women do is greeted with and discussed with a reflexive skepticism,” Sittenfeld said. “I felt like it was such a great pinpointing of something that I’ve experienced personally, and I’ve witnessed so much. It certainly applies to women running for office. I think it applies to almost everything women do, and certainly to women writing books.”
It’s a sometimes-subtle tonal difference that Sittenfeld observes: “If you read a profile in a magazine about a male, it would be very plausible that...it would be packaged as ‘This is the great American novel’ or ‘This is the novel of the year.’ If that’s said about women’s books, I can’t remember when,” she said. It’s more likely that books by women would be branded and described as “the beach book of the summer.”
“There’s just this subtext of respect that’s given to men and deference to their authority and their intent that’s absent in descriptions of women in their art,” Sittenfeld said, before laughing a little. “Not that I have strong feelings about any of this.”
It presents for her, a sort of Hillary-esque dilemma: Does she use her fame and privilege to call out the gender differences, or risk looking whiny and being told to pipe down and do her job? “In all honesty, having this conversation with you, saying the things I just said, even as I said them, I was like, ‘Hmm, I wonder if that will come back to bite me,’” Sittenfeld admitted. “And, by the way, I believe what I just said.”
As the buzz for Rodham reaches fever pitch, the question looms: Will real-life Hillary read the novelized version of her what-if life? Sittenfeld doesn’t expect her to, and she’s resisted the urge to reach out. “I’ve considered sending her the book, but it feels a little cheeky,” she said. “I don’t think I get to write exactly the book I want and become best friends with Hillary. That might be too much to ask of the world.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
