Curtis Sittenfeld talks about her novel 'Rodham'

After Curtis Sittenfeld wrote "American Wife" — her fictionalized portrait of a woman who strongly resembled Laura Bush — editors asked her to write essays about women in politics. Specifically, Hillary Clinton.
She turned them all down until an editor at Esquire magazine asked for a short story. A piece of fiction, told from Hillary's point of view.
"It's such a different way of approaching her," Sittenfeld said. "Not asking what the American people think of her, but what does she think of the American people. That turned out to be a super-interesting question to explore."
The story, "The Nominee," ran in Esquire in May 2016 and opens the U.K. edition of Sittenfeld's 2018 collection "You Think It, I'll Say It."
After she finished it, Sittenfeld realized she had more to say. "I thought to myself, and I told my editor, I think I'm going to write a really short, like a 120-page novel," she said. Four hundred pages later, she was done.
"Rodham" (Random House, $28) explores the provocative question: What would Hillary Clinton's life have been like had she not married Bill? The first quarter or so follows the real Hillary's life pretty closely. Character Hillary has a passionate affair with Bill Clinton (yes, the book has a lot of sex scenes), whom she meets at Yale Law School. She moves with him to Arkansas.
But then, at around page 150, Hillary turns down Bill's proposal of marriage, moves back up north, and the whole rest of "Rodham" flows straight from Sittenfeld's fertile imagination. Is it fate?
In the later chapters of "Rodham," though pure fiction, there are echoes of the life we know about. A man who becomes a close friend commits suicide, and Hillary is accused of murder. Bill appears on "60 Minutes" with his wife at his side to apologize for sexual transgressions. Hillary makes an unfortunate remark about baking cookies.
It's almost as if she can't escape her fate.
"That's one of the big questions that I thought about," Sittenfeld said. "What is fate, what is free will, do we all have parallel lives that are totally different, or only slightly different?
"I think it's more interesting if her parallel life has a relationship to her real life. I could have made her live in a different country and have seven children. I could have done anything — it's a novel.
"But I think it's more interesting when there's tension" between the two lives.
About those sex scenes. "At one point an editor did ask me: Wait, do you really want to include these? And I thought, hmm, yes, I do. I think they serve the story."
The novel, which is narrated by Hillary, begins this way: "The first time I saw him, I thought he looked like a lion."
There is no mistaking who she is talking about — the fictitious Bill Clinton is larger than life, charming, brilliant, needy, manipulative and, yes, sexy.
"Even though the premise of the novel is what if Hillary hadn't married Bill, it's not difficult for me to see why she did marry him," Sittenfeld said.