The bestselling author on reimagining Hillary Clinton’s life, what novelists have learned from Covid and the mood in her home town, Minneapolis, since the murder of George Floyd
Curtis Sittenfeld, 45, is the author of two short story collections and six novels, including Prep, her 2005 debut about a teenage girl at boarding school, and American Wife, narrated by a White House first lady, based on Laura Bush. Both books were bestsellers longlisted for the Orange prize (now the Women’s prize for fiction). Her latest novel, Rodham, out in paperback next month, imagines how Hillary Clinton’s political career might have looked had she not married Bill. Sittenfeld, who was born in Ohio and studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, spoke to me on Zoom from Minneapolis, where she has lived since 2018.
What led you to write a counterfactual novel about Hillary Clinton?
Early in 2016, Esquire asked if I’d like to write a short story from Hillary’s perspective as she accepted the Democratic presidential nomination. It was an interesting exercise, but I don’t think I’d have gone on to write Rodham had Trump not won the 2016 election. I was devastated. I found myself thinking about schoolchildren who had known Hillary was running for president. In many cases, they literally didn’t know Bill Clinton existed or that she’d been first lady – they knew her as a politician. I thought, what if adults also didn’t see Hillary and Bill as connected? Would the 2016 election have turned out differently?
