The former First Lady is the subject of a new book Rodham - author Curtis Sittenfeld, in her fifth novel, returns to the premise of that bygone joke to ask: what would’ve happened to Hillary if she’d never married Bill? | ThatAmelia
Bill and Hillary Clinton stop at a petrol station. The attendant, it turns out, is a high school boyfriend of Hillary. As they pull away, Bill says, “Just think – if you’d married him, you’d be the wife of a petrol station worker.” Hillary responds: “No, Bill. If I’d married him, he’d be president of the United States.”
In the early ’90s, after Bill Clinton was elected president but before we knew the extent of his unwieldy appetites, that joke was everywhere. Hillary, at the time, was merely an impressive first lady. Her job description was to perform wifehood and, as a result, her intellect was something to be celebrated. Later, especially when she ran for political office, that brilliance became a liability – and her refusal to leave Bill another sign of a conniving personality.
As Sittenfeld imagines it, Hillary was attracted to Bill first for his striking good looks , then for his ability, unusual in Hillary’s male contemporaries, to appreciate her mind. Later on in, as in real life, these qualities become dangerous. Bill famously proposed to Hillary three times before she agreed to marry him; in Sittenfeld’s story, they break up after the third proposal and Hillary returns to her home town, Chicago, to begin a highly successful career in law.
If that quote about managing your anxieties doesn’t tempt you to throw this magazine across the room, you can probably see my point. In literature, and politics, maybe it really does all come down to charisma. As Sittenfeld puts it in, Bill Clinton is simply “a person who took up more than his share of oxygen”. And ink, inevitably.
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