The first is that, according to biographer Carl Bernstein, in 1993 the Clintons travelled together to St Louis, Missouri. I don’t see Hillary as saintly, but the two damning titbits that emerged about her in my research that have stayed with me are actually absurdly insignificant. The Clintons campaigning with Al and Tipper Gore, in Michigan, 2000.

This murkiness contrasts with the events that currently unfold on a weekly basis in the White House – consider the New York Times headline on 21 April “Trump (the Company) Asks Trump (the Administration) for Hotel Relief ” – that prompt me to sincerely wonder, how can this possibly be legal? After reading multiple accounts of the controversy around “Whitewater”, Bill and Hillary’s late 1970s real estate investment, I still would struggle to cogently summarise the sequence of events to another human. On close examination, what’s striking about these supposed scandals is that they either have no relationship to reality or she’s being accused of something that I (and admittedly I’m not a lawyer) would not at first glance understand to be inappropriate, let alone illegal. The false accusations levelled at her range from murky acts of financial malfeasance, to bonkers conspiracy theories about paedophilia, to persistent suggestions that she mishandled email when she was secretary of state. Multi-decade rumour mill notwithstanding, it’s hard to find examples of things Hillary has done wrong.

What I didn’t know when I embarked on writing in March 2017 was how much I’d teach myself – or perhaps I should say how much Hillary would teach me. Plus, it tapped into my fascination with politics, fame, and the discrepancy between our public and private selves – all themes I first explored in my 2008 novel American Wife, which was a fictionalised retelling of the life of Laura Bush.īut where American Wife mostly embellishes the real or historical timeline, Rodham creates a parallel universe. Writing Rodham was definitely an example of the latter. I’m 44, and it was only a few years ago, after well over three decades of writing fiction, that I realised I have devoted much of my life to this creative act for two reasons above all: to entertain myself and to soothe myself. But instead we live in this world, not that one, and, for my own sake, I did need to write a novel in which the 2016 US presidential election unfolded differently.

2016 novel curtis sittenfeld