What Happened

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

When I finished my edits to the final page of this manuscript one warm midsummer afternoon in 2017, I put down my pen and walked straight out the door. It was sunny and beautiful in our backyard, and as I stood with my face turned toward the sky, I said a prayer—nothing fancy, just a wish sent into the universe. I prayed that all the dangers I had painstakingly detailed in the book—the attacks on our democracy by a foreign power, the flood of fake news filling our screens, the staggering corruption of the Trump administration—would abate. Maybe my fears for our future would turn out to be overblown. Maybe America would find its way back to a stable balance. Almost a year later, that hasn’t happened. Not even close. So I’m picking up my pen again to try to capture some of what’s happened since this book was published and to offer my thoughts on what we need to do now.