Why do so many Americans, even a seemingly substantial proportion of those who plan on voting for her, find Hillary Clinton so dislikable? Feverish with anxiety about Tuesday’s election, this was the question I was pondering as I prowled my bookshelves the other day.
I still can’t answer it, not fully. All I am able to offer is my conviction that this loathing, unfathomable to many of us, may run deeper even than I had supposed. On my shelves, I found Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary, a collection of essays by female writers that was published in the US in 2008, shortly after Clinton announced her candidacy for the presidency first time around. Picking it up – I’d clean forgotten that I owned it – I felt an antidote to my perception of Americans’ perception of Clinton might finally be in sight; edited by Susan Morrison, it contains pieces by such writers as Daphne Merkin, Lorrie Moore and Katie Roiphe (and also, a cartoon by Roz Chast). Wouldn’t they be cheering her on? But, no. It isn’t so much that the essays don’t respond to the issue of Clinton’s likability, because they do. Rather, it’s that this is virtually their sole preoccupation. “I have yet to meet a woman who likes Hillary Clinton,” writes Roiphe at the opening of her essay, Elect Sister Frigidaire.
Still, it makes for fascinating reading, should you be in the market for a Clinton book. Alongside the perennial question of her ambition, and whether we will ever accept such single-minded determination in a woman, here are entertaining and insightful analyses of such things as her favourite book (Little Women by Louisa M Alcott), her favourite foods (when Bill was in the White House, she liked to snack on a particular brand of protein burgers), and her hobbies (none, in essence, though she did once claim to have a passion for, among other things, archaeology, modern art, and the novels of Thomas Hardy). My favourite essay, however, is the one by Ariel Levy, in which she brutally unpicks the way, after her husband was exposed as a cheater, Clinton became “a walking Rorschach test for our feelings about infidelity”. Blistering, open-eyed, it makes more sense of the Clintons’ marriage than just about anything I’ve ever read.
