Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld

Summary

From the New York Times bestselling author of American Wife and Eligible, a novel that imagines a deeply compelling what-might-have-been: What if Hillary Rodham hadn’t married Bill Clinton?

In 1971, Hillary Rodham is a young woman full of promise: Life magazine has covered her Wellesley commencement speech, she’s attending Yale Law School, and she’s on the forefront of student activism and the women’s rights movement. And then she meets Bill Clinton. A handsome, charismatic southerner and fellow law student, Bill is already planning his political career. In each other, the two find a profound intellectual, emotional, and physical connection that neither has previously experienced.

In the real world, Hillary followed Bill back to Arkansas, and he proposed several times; although she said no more than once, as we all know, she eventually accepted and became Hillary Clinton.

But in Curtis Sittenfeld’s powerfully imagined tour de force of fiction, Hillary takes a different road. Feeling doubt about the prospective marriage, she endures their devastating breakup and leaves Arkansas. Over the next four decades, she blazes her own trail—one that unfolds in public as well as in private, that involves crossing paths again (and again) with Bill Clinton, and that raises questions about the trade-offs all of us must make in building a life.

Brilliantly weaving a riveting fictional tale into actual historical events, Curtis Sittenfeld delivers an uncannily astute and witty story for our times. In exploring the loneliness, moral ambivalence, and iron determination that characterize the quest for political power, as well as both the exhilaration and painful compromises demanded of female ambition in a world still run mostly by men, Rodham is a singular and unforgettable novel.

 
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Book Setting: Arkansas, Illinois, Connecticut, California

  1. Park Ridge, Illinois

  2. Wellesley College

  3. Yale Law School

  4. Lillian Goldman Law Library

  5. Hope, Arkansas

  6. Hot Spring, Arkansas

  7. Emerson Middle School

  8. Orange Street, New Haven

  9. Dixwell, New Haven

  10. Elm Diner

  11. Wisner Street, Park Ridge

  12. Muir Woods

  13. Elmwood, Berkeley

  14. City Lights Booksellers & Publishers

  15. Edgewood Avenue

  16. University of Arkansas

  17. White River Park

  18. Washington Avenue, Fayetteville

  19. Walker Park

  20. Northwestern Pritzker School of Law

  21. Streeterville

  22. Levy Mayer Hall

  23. Old State House Museum

Reviews

“Sittenfeld movingly captures Hillary’s awareness of her transformation into a complicated public figure…Readers won’t have to be feminists (though it would help) to relish Sittenfeld’s often funny, mostly sympathetic, and always sharp what-if.

—Publishers Weekly

“[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

“Rodham is a provocative, bitingly funny re-imagining of what a woman’s life could be if she didn’t need to compromise her own ambitions in support of her partner’s. Sittenfeld has written a nuanced, astute portrait of one of modern history’s most contentious figures, and never shies away from either the thornier aspects of her character, or those of our society.”

—Refinery29