But in Rodham, Sittenfeld leans all the way in to the Hillary-ness, not bothering to change names and using a full-bleed, sepia-toned vintage photo on the cover. In 2008’s American Wife, Sittenfeld recast Laura Bush as a librarian turned first lady named Alice Lindgren who, like the real-life former first lady, gets into a car accident in high school that that leaves a classmate dead. “The margin between staying and leaving was so thin,” Hillary laments in Rodham. The two sex each other silly from Yale Law School to San Francisco to the rural roads of Arkansas, where, in between campaign stops, Bill asks, “Will you take off your panties and let me touch you while I drive?” His “compulsive infidelity” is but one of five reasons the pragmatic Hillary tallies for dumping him still, she barely makes it out of Fayetteville. The “almost intolerable ecstasy” between them makes it hard for Sittenfeld’s Hillary to walk away from fictional Bill, a unicorn of a guy who actually loves her for her brain. “Weirdly, it almost feels like a testament to their love,” she said, “like someone saying, ‘I’m going to be so bad for you’ right before you sleep together.” Leave it to Sittenfeld (who, in American Wife, gave us the mental image of a thinly veiled Laura Bush gazing down at a young W.’s head between her legs) to make the Clintons’ long and somewhat scandalous love story seem.kinda hot? Some might find that ominous, but not Sittenfeld. “I really want you to marry me, but you shouldn’t do it,” he recalled telling her in his speech at Hillary’s history-making 2016 Democratic National Convention. The Clintons themselves have made myth of Hillary’s initial refusals and Bill’s warning to his future wife that his career could subsume hers.

“I knew from real life that she had turned down his proposals twice before accepting the third time, so it seemed like a plausible path not taken,” Sittenfeld said of her critical plot twist.

American wife novel