Rodham

by Curtis Sittenfeld

He seemed like a person who took up more than his share of oxygen.

“You do realize,” he said, and he was smiling, too, “that it’s entirely possible to be from Chicago and still be an East Coast snob?”

Called out

I was twenty-one, meaning absurdly young yet old enough to consider myself newly worldly and to see my limited experiences as conclusive.

I knew plenty of smart people, but I’d never before encountered a person whose intelligence sharpened mine the way his did. His perspective both overlapped with and differed from mine so as to be challenging, reassuring, and never boring.

I had respected my father’s intelligence, not recognizing how much sharper my mother’s was because hers was concealed by being pleasant and female.

“Your beard,” my father said to him. “Do you find that it makes people wonder if you’re a communist?”

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

“And I want a woman in that seat. Whether it’s Alan Dixon or Joe Biden or George Bush, I’m so tired of these idiot men getting to make up the rules for the rest of us. They’re not smarter. They’re not nicer. They don’t have better judgment. They’re just men.”

How likable did a woman need to be in order to earn the right to run and not be accused of undermining her party?