Let me start off by saying that I very much enjoy every book that I have read by this author (this book makes five, so I am not such a fan that I devour every book as it emerges, but enough of a fan to keep coming back for more), so weigh that in as you decide whether this book is for you. It asks the question "who is Hilary without Bill?" and what might have happened it she left him when she found out that he had a deep seated compulsion to cheat. In telling that story, the author very directly and accurately examines the prevalent sexism that women face in literally every professional field, and it is oddly comforting to see it so expertly flayed ouIt is a voice we recognize, the voice of countless hours of TV interviews and debates, the voice of several best-selling memoirs, the confident, carefully modulated voice of a woman who has been telling her story for decades. Indeed, the first third of the book, which is what actually happened, feels comfortably familiar. There’s bright young Hillary speaking at her Wellesley graduation in 1969, already burdened by the discontinuity between “how I seemed to others and who I really was.” Looking back over half a century, she realizes that the intertwined conditions of her life were set early: “my competence, my loneliness.” The standards that are routinely applied to women and completely ignored for men are glaringly obvious and yet somehow a happy ending is attained. This is the alternate universe where the right thing happens in 2016.
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