Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

“Maybe life isn’t about the absence of embarrassment, it’s about the mastery of embarrassment.”

“There are two kinds of marriages,” Barbara said. “The ones where you’re privy to how messy they are, and the ones where you’re not.”

painful topics were not improved upon by preemptive hand-wringing or by sugarcoating.

“Republicans are ruthless fuckers, and it’s the only thing I admire about them.”

I was Midwestern enough to not only accept the downside to any situation but even to experience it with relief; life wasn’t supposed to be perfect.

“It’s weird you almost married Bill Clinton, because he seems so unworthy of you.”

Sometimes I think I’ve made so few mistakes that the public can remember all of them, in contrast to certain male politicians whose multitude of gaffes and transgressions gets jumbled in the collective imagination, either negated by one another or forgotten in the onslaught. The less you screw up, the more clearly the public keeps track of each error.

“Who’s the blues musician who supposedly sold his soul to the devil?” I said. Diwata laughed. “Robert Johnson, but have you ever listened to his stuff? It was totally worth it.”

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

“We can spend hours pondering why American voters can be dipshits or we can take advantage of it.