What Should Have Happened In Hillary Clinton’s Useless Book An artless and inauthentic memoir, written by the absence of Clinton.

At 2 in the morning after Election Day in 2016, the absence of  Hillary Clinton  walked onto a stage at the Javits Center in Manhattan. The absence of Hillary Clinton is vast. It pullulates like slime mold across the internet; it screams from TV screens; it peers dim and terrified from behind Clinton’s own eyes. Since the election, it’s grown to swallow the whole of American and international politics. But that night, it appeared in the form of her campaign chair, John Podesta. He came out gangly and enthusiastic, flapping a cavernous mouth open and shut to strange, wild applause. Clinton, he told the crowd at her campaign headquarters, would not be appearing to make her concession speech. “We can wait a little bit longer, can’t we?” he said. “Everybody should head home. We should get some sleep. We’ll have more to say tomorrow.” Clinton herself didn’t appear until hours later: coiffed, grinning wryly, sepulchral. Between the two speeches, stories and rumors circulated, frantic gnats twirling in her absence. Hillary Clinton had locked herself in her hotel room. Hillary Clinton refused to talk to anyone. Hillary Clinton was insensate, or catatonic, or drunk or mindless on Xanax and disbelief.

What could she have been  thinking ? Everyone suffers disappointments and defeats, but this was a unique experience. For decades, she had wanted to be the most powerful person in the world (back in the Arkansas Governor’s Mansion, she and her husband had let a few friends in on their plan for “eight years of Bill, eight years of Hill”). She had served in almost every level of American government; she was smart; her résumé was perfect. And she had lost twice. Once, to a preternaturally charismatic newcomer who rode the bloodied tides of history to become the first black president. No shame in that. And then, that night in 2016, she lost to a rambling con man, a deranged clown with comic white circles under his eyes, a washed-up former reality-show host who knew nothing, understood nothing, believed whatever the last person he spoke to had told him and had the dubious honor of being the least popular major-party nominee in U.S. electoral history.  Donald Trump  had undone years of careful scheming. It had all been for nothing. How must that have  felt ?

This is why I can’t entirely agree with the chorus of people who rushed to condemn  What Happened , Hillary Clinton’s “intimate view” of what it was like to go up against Trump in the 2016 election. On the left, a quick consensus formed: Clinton lost; she has nothing useful to say anymore and never did; she needs to shut up and go away immediately. It’s not really so clear. Hers is a strange story in an increasingly strange world. It’s one that needs telling. And as her die-hard defenders proclaimed, Clinton can write a book if she wants, and nobody gets to stop her. They’re not wrong. She has every right to write a book about the election. But not  this  book.  Nobody  should ever be allowed to write a book like this.

You can play a dire game with  What Happened.  Call it the $20 Million Game. Open the book to a random page and remember that Clinton sold her last book for an advance of $14 million, and then consider that the figure for this one is probably even higher. “You could say my campaign started with a snappy internet video … but I think it started with something a lot more ordinary: a Chipotle burrito bowl.” Twenty million dollars. A monstrously mangled idiom: “Never wrestle a pig in the mud. They have cloven hooves, which give them superior traction.” Twenty million dollars. A description of something called alternate nostril breathing: “This practice allows oxygen to activate both the right side of the brain, which is the source of your creativity and imagination, and the left side, which controls reason and logic.” Twenty million dollars. And a double whammy of artless literary allusion, in response to some early idiocy of Trump’s: “The episode was silly, but also an early warning: we were in a ‘brave new world.’” Line break. “If the inauguration on Friday was the worst of times, Saturday turned out to be the best of times.” Twenty million dollars. An impossible amount of money. For this.

She’s not trying to be honest or readable; Clinton is still desperate for you to support her campaign. Everything she writes feels metallic in the mouth, weightless and inauthentic. She starts her book with a record of what she felt watching Trump’s inauguration. “Deep breath. Feel the air fill my lungs. This is the right thing to do. … I’m imagining I’m anywhere but here, Bali maybe? Bali would be good.” This is not how a 69-year-old woman writes. It’s an imitation of how some of her  fans  write, a sterile, chatty facsimile of a first-person blog. She wants, still, to be relatable.

“In the past,” Clinton writes in her introduction, “for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I’m letting my guard down.” Maybe that’s true. But the unguarded recollections in  What Happened sound a lot like someone who will be stuck in election mode for the rest of her life. They sound ghost-written and focus-grouped, scrubbed to a shine, as fake as anything any career politician says from the podium. Just like on that night in Midtown Manhattan, when Podesta delivered a non-concession in her place, she won’t face the audience. As Kafka taught us in  Before the Law , sometimes there’s nothing behind the guard. This book was written by the absence of Hillary Clinton.

In literary terms, the book could be classed as a Mary Sue self-insertion fanfic. Reading What Happened  induces a horrifying claustrophobia, the feeling of being pent up in a small room as someone delivers an unending lecture about how much better they are than everyone else. Like every horrifying little room, this one is cluttered with cutesy sayings on every wall. Each chapter begins and ends with an inspirational quote about believing in yourself and reaching higher, 25 epigraphs in total. One (“It is  hard  to be a woman. You must think like a man, act like a lady, look like a young girl, and work like a horse”) is attributed to “a sign that hangs in my house.”

To be fair, Clinton acknowledges that she made mistakes — but they are all of a particular type. Her optics were faulty; her messaging went out of tune. She didn’t successfully communicate how great and progressive she really is, how wrong you were to dislike her. This is a politician who never made craven or reactionary decisions, just tough choices and hard compromises. Her wars are glossed over; her racist 2008 campaign disappears almost entirely; her support for the Honduran coup regime that murdered Berta Cáceres is unmentionable, disappearing into a warm fug of “kindness and love.” Sometimes it’s even more direct. “I have friends who get frustrated with their spouses who, instead of listening to them vent about a problem and commiserating, jump straight into trying to solve it. That was my problem with many voters: I skipped the venting and went straight to the solving.” She failed because she was simply  too good  at making things better.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-what-happened-review_us_59c16721e4b0186c22066d72