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The More Things Change

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THE YEAR is 1971. Hillary is a second-year law student at Yale, where she meets a charismatic classmate from Arkansas. Bill is leonine, a Rhodes scholar, voracious. “I have found a man who loves my brain,” she confides to a friend from Wellesley. For months, the two devour each other. The conversation is as vigorous as the sex. That summer, while interning at an Oakland firm specializing in civil liberties, she discovers him kissing her boss’s daughter. She forgives him, but she does not forget. A few years pass. Hillary works as an attorney on the Nixon impeachment inquiry. Bill teaches law at the University of Arkansas and prepares to run for Congress. Three times he proposes to her; three times she hesitates. Then a former campaign volunteer approaches her in a grocery store parking lot, claiming that Bill raped her. “You shouldn’t marry me,” Bill confesses one night. “You should leave.” It is here that Rodham, the new novel from popular author Curtis Sittenfeld, departs from the hi

The More Things Change Review The More Things Change Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham imagines the world exactly as it always was. Andrea Long Chu July 8, 2020 Hillary Clinton attends the premiere of the Hulu documentary Hillary at the DGA New York Theater on March 4th, 2020. Photo: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP Images Tweet Copy Link Email Print Discussed in this essay: Rodham , by Curtis Sittenfeld. Random House, 2020. 432 pages. THE YEAR is 1971. Hillary is a second-year law student at Yale, where she meets a charismatic classmate from Arkansas. Bill is leonine, a Rhodes scholar, voracious. “I have f

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