Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld review – where would Hillary be without Bill Clinton?

The author of American Wife returns with a fantasy of what might have been, in which Hillary becomes her true self

Love is the great accident. We can fall for the wrong person, or we can have the great good fortune to attach ourselves to the right person, and the strange thing is, we may never know which is which.

In Curtis Sittenfeld’s 2008 novel American Wife, a woman’s tough love pulls her husband back from alcoholism and then he becomes president of the United States. That woman is a fictional version of Laura Bush and she sometimes wonders at the amazing, almost casual particularity of her role in history. People seem to blame her: “His election is my fault, his presidency is my fault, his war is my fault. Why couldn’t I just have let him be an alcoholic? Plenty of wives put up with it every day!”

The problem is that this fictional Hillary is not as interesting as the proud and private human being we wonder about

Related: Hillary without Bill: Curtis Sittenfeld rewrites Clinton's personal history

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