When Hillary Clinton announced her new memoir, What Happened, she promised she’d be “letting my guard down” in it, detailing her unfiltered thoughts and feelings around the 2016 election. And if the quotes CNN has excerpted are any guide, it looks like she actually delivers. The network reportedly picked up a copy of the memoir, which is out next week from Simon & Schuster, at a bookstore in Jacksonville, Florida. In it, a cowed Clinton combs over her campaign and (somewhat) takes responsibility for her loss.
“I go back over my own shortcomings and the mistakes we made,” she writes. “I take responsibility for all of them. You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want — but I was the candidate. It was my campaign. Those were my decisions.”
As advertised, Clinton also grapples with why people across the country find her so easy to hate. “What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I’m really asking. I’m at a loss,” she writes before adding, “I think it’s partly because I’m a woman.”
And in certain sections she talks about her own marriage, reportedly “bemoaning the fascination with her relationship” and attempting to mitigate it:
I heard it again on the 2016 campaign … it’s just a marriage on paper now,” she writes, adding “(he is reading this over my shoulder in our kitchen with our dogs underfoot and in a minute he will reorganize our bookshelves for the millionth time … but I don’t mind because he really loves to organize those bookshelves).
There were times that I was deeply unsure about whether our marriage could or should survive,” she wrote. “But on those days, I asked myself the questions that mattered to me: Do I still love him? And can I still be in this marriage without becoming unrecognizable to myself — twisted by anger, resentment, or remoteness? The answers were always yes.
On the whole, CNN writes that What Happens “reads like the term paper of a student studying the most unpredictable loss in modern American politics.” And if you’re lucky, it’s coming soon to a city near you.
