Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

Thus the feeling was a sense of my own competence blended with the knowledge that I was about to pull off a feat most people thought, correctly or not, they couldn’t. And this knowledge contributed to the final aspect of the feeling, which was loneliness—the loneliness of being good at something.

“Part of the problem with just empathy with professed goals is that empathy doesn’t do us anything. We’ve had lots of empathy; we’ve had lots of sympathy, but we feel that for too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible. And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible.”

The reality was that I was a hardworking and not beautiful middle-class Midwestern girl with a mean father. I had never believed the world existed for my enjoyment. I’d believed instead that every situation was a trade-off, that there was always a catch.

But there is something about another person caring when you go to sleep at night and when you wake up in the morning—caring not because of what they need from you but just because they love you—that is a novelty for me. There’s a sweetness and solace in it that I don’t take for granted.