What Hillary Clinton lost was her chance to be the first female US president; what she has gained in the eight years since that wrenching disappointment is less clear. “My life is richer and my spirit is stronger,” she insists, but her new book, Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love and Liberty, reveals her to be also the victim of lingering PTSD. Brooding about her defeat, she muddles the five-step grieving process and alternates between denial and anger, bargaining and depression. As yet, despite walks in the woods and romps with her grandchildren, she seems not to have arrived at acceptance. Just as Donald Trump continues to grouse about the supposedly stolen election of 2020, so Clinton shadow-boxes her way through endless reruns of her wonky, uncharismatic 2016 campaign.
An FBI official, she relates, recently commiserated with her about Trump’s victory and blamed the bureau for tripping up her candidacy when it reopened an investigation into her emails. Clinton spurns his offer of sympathy, snapping “I would have been a great president”, and stalks away. Later, she elaborates a morbid fantasy about the US in Trump’s second term, with troops in the streets and concentration camps for refugees. In 2016, Trump anatomised American malaise and boasted: “I alone can fix it.” Clinton’s doomy scenario has a corresponding unspoken subtext. “I alone,” she seems to imply, “could have stopped him.”
Her sense of entitlement leads her to experiment with appropriate titles for herself, if only the outcome had been different. In the 19th century, the first lady was sometimes called the lady presidentress, which for Clinton has a certain antique allure. She also wonders whether she could have got away with calling herself President Rodham Clinton, in deference to her parents, and to differentiate herself from her husband. Deprived of power, she has had to settle for fame, and she moves in a blinding glare of publicity. When she teaches at Columbia University, her students are allowed five minutes in which to photograph her before the class begins. Her buddy Steven Spielberg advises her about pitching a movie idea in Hollywood; she goes to Broadway plays – where she once “got two standing ovations just for showing up!” – with her bosom chum Anna Wintour. Canoeing in rural Georgia, she just happens to be accompanied “by a small film crew”. At her most grandiose, she is something of a mythomaniac. She rails at an “alt-right” website that depicts Trump as Perseus and Clinton as the beheaded Medusa, but reveals that as a girl she modelled herself on Greek prototypes such as “Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, and Artemis, the goddess of the hunt”, even asking her mother “if I could get a bow and arrow”. Would that have equipped her to puncture the puffed-up Trump?
Clinton’s publisher, she says, wanted a volume of table talk; instead, she delivered a series of op-eds on universal day care, abortion law and her other “passion projects”. Informality does not come naturally to a woman who feels “the weight of civic responsibility” and even patriotically colour codes her clothes for her “symbolic moments”. Those pressures have institutionalised her: she is as uptight as the Statue of Liberty. A section on her marriage briefly mentions Bill Clinton’s impeachment while saying nothing about the sexual lapses that provoked it. Perhaps she gives more away when she lightheartedly remembers Bill making “plans for his someday funeral”. But then she astonishingly remarks that she feels “a lot of guilt about what my run for president did to Bill”: is she deflecting her own pain or injecting it into him?
Dreaming about a coronation rather than an inauguration, she watches the 80-year-old Joni Mitchell at an awards ceremony regally “holding court from an armchair that looked like a golden throne”, with her cane as a sceptre. This may be Clinton’s preferred persona: on the book’s cover, an unrecognisable photograph by Annie Leibovitz, another BFF, portrays her as an extravagantly maned lion queen. Here, as always, Clinton retreats into official inscrutability, showing the world a sober and strictly public face. “I take no pleasure in being right,” she says when Trump is convicted of 34 felonies. Couldn’t she have allowed herself just a small illicit thrill of schadenfreude?
Clinton, now 76, concludes by anticipating another decade of strenuous activism. She feels “a responsibility for building the future”; meanwhile, however, she is receding into the past. When she says: “I flew on Air Force One, dined with kings and queens, and was constantly surrounded by armed guards”, she sounds like a soliloquist in a nursing home, ruefully revisiting her glory days while her fellow residents nod off. Whether in politics or not, as we age we are all monarchs nudged into abdication, or presidents arriving at the end of their allotted term. It’s a melancholy fate, but better, I suppose, than being binned like a limp lettuce after its sell-by date.
• Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love and Liberty by Hillary Rodham Clinton is published by Simon & Schuster (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
