To a politician with a grudge, everything looks like an opportunity to settle a score. For Hillary Clinton, it looks like an opportunity to inflict yet another memoir on an unsuspecting public.

Clinton is the author of three previous memoirs, and her new book, Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty, strives to offer a different version of her. From the e.e. cummings–like lower-case lettering and heavily filtered author photo on the cover, to the Zen koan–like title of the book itself, all is meant to signal that this is not Hillary the First Lady, Hillary the Senator, Hillary the Secretary of State, or Hillary the Failed Presidential Candidate. This is Hillary: The Human.

This Hillary tells us about her girls’ weekends and the nickname the women of “Hillaryland,” as her longtime coterie of female admirers and former employees is called, gave her. It’s “Big Girl.” She reveals how Joni Mitchell’s 2024 Grammy performance inspired her and that she has granted her “postmenopausal belly” the name “Beulah.”

Of course, this new casual Hillary still requires substantial staff and support. It took a village to write her previous books, and she notes that this one did, too, including three named co-authors and an acknowledgements section that reads like a parody of a Baby Boomer’s LinkedIn page. Every “Center for Citizenship” and women’s-history chair named after Hillary is dutifully catalogued. She might not have been our first female president, but now we all know she was appointed the “first female chancellor” of Queens University Belfast.

Hillary (like Cher, she can now be referred to by a singular moniker) is so well known that she need not grubby her hands asking for blurbs for her book, like common authors. Instead, readers are offered a blurb by the author herself that affords a glimpse of the cliché-addled prose within: “Personally and professionally I’ve come through so many highs and lows, times when I felt on top of the world and others when I was in a deep, dark hole. After all these years, I really have looked at life and love ‘from both sides now.’”

The strain of maintaining this everywoman mien (“Hillary: She’s just like us!”) becomes almost immediately visible, however, and we are soon back on familiar ground, with Hillary casually relaying name-dropping anecdotes about “friends” such as Jane Fonda (Hillary admires her philosophy of aging) and recalling how she popped by to catch up with other well-meaning pals at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Dubai, where she was the Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation’s “global ambassador for heat, health, and gender,” and where they were comfortably “cocooned in the air-conditioned conference rooms” of their Dubai hosts.

Although lacking in self-awareness, Hillary Rodham Clinton cap-tures both the good and the bad in her generation of Boomer Democrats. They tend toward the hawkish on foreign policy, generally have the back of our allies, and are prone to criticize the excesses of young people who think donning a keffiyeh and denouncing Jews is admirable and that suppressing the speech of others is fine. She worries correctly about the negative side effects of excessive social-media use by the young.

But she embodies many of the vices of the Boomers as well: Self-pity, condescension, denial or evasion of responsibility for things they did while wielding power. She claims an FBI official (unnamed, natch) apologized for the way the bureau handled the investigation of her email server before the 2016 election. A clearly proud Hillary responded, “I would have been a great president,” before walking away.

Despite claiming at the outset of this volume that she would delve into more personal aspects of her life, including her marriage, when it comes to Bill Clinton, Hillary’s prose becomes notably abstract—although she does still claim to find him the most handsome man in every room. This may have less to do with marital bliss than with brand management. In the post–MeToo era, the Clintons are eager for Americans to forget Bill’s extramarital affairs and impeachment-inducing Oval Office dalliance with an intern. Instead, they have promoted a carefully curated image as a couple: important global leaders who run the Clinton Foundation, despite some questions over the years about the ethics of how donations to that foundation are raised and spent.

Readers can decide for themselves whether to take Hillary at her word about her marriage to Bill. The memoir does reveal, however, that she is still involved in a dysfunctional relationship with another male politician: Donald Trump. He first appears on page 3, when Hillary describes (in perhaps the book’s earliest example of poor writing) the “pang of vindication” she experienced when she saw a news alert that Trump had been “convicted of thirty-four felonies related to election fraud in 2016.”

Vindicated Hillary has now entered the chat, and listening to her is like being trapped by a boor at an overheated party: “If news about Trump’s affair with porn star Stormy Daniels had caused just forty thousand people across Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to change their minds, I would have won,” she writes. In fact, if she had bothered to campaign in Wisconsin and not call half of the voters in the country “deplorable,” she might indeed have won. But Hillary is undeterred: “Yes, I did warn you. Yes, I said Trump was a con man, a Russian puppet, and a threat to democracy. . . . I take no pleasure in being right. In fact, I hate it.”

Someone who compares herself to Cassandra in Greek mythology clearly doesn’t “hate it.” She even doubles down on her “deplorables” statement: “It was an unfortunate choice of words and bad politics, but it also got at an important truth.” Later, she states that it is “objectively true” that those same deplorables remain “irredeemable” because of their political views, only to declare, a few pages on, “I believe in the basic decency of the American people.”

Such hyperbole abounds, as do the left’s greatest hits of misleading tropes about the right, including the idea that a cabal of “Christian nationalists” is hellbent on recreating The Handmaid’s Tale. (“For them, the dystopian Gilead . . . isn’t a cautionary tale; it’s an aspiration.”) Her complaints culminate in a multipage screed imagining the dystopian world we will all inhabit if Trump becomes president again. In attempting to express her real feelings about her political enemies, Hillary might think she is coming across as honest and human. In fact, she sounds unhinged.

She also sounds resentful—not only about her loss to Trump but also about his political comeback as a candidate. As the Washington Post acknowledged, her book “reads like the State of the Union address that the former senator and secretary of state dreamed of giving.” In that sense, it is inadvertently revealing of her core personality: ever and always focused on political power, even after she has lost it.

This is perhaps why her insistence throughout the book that she is content—She is productive! She is in demand! She’s living her best life!—comes across as more than a little forced. One suspects Hillary would instantly swap the supposedly “glorious grandmother days” of these septuagenarian years (complete with glamorous kaftans and chardonnay-soaked girls’ weekends) for another grasp at the brass ring of power.

In the 2008 New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary debate, then–Senator Barack Obama said that Hillary Clinton was “likable enough.” That might still be the judgment of those who live in Hillaryland, and by publishing this book, Hillary seems to believe it herself. For the rest of us, after so many Hillary memoirs containing so much sanctimony and so little self-reflection, “likable” is not a word that comes to mind. “Enough,” though, is. As in: Enough already.

Photo: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

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