Hill's Awkward College Letters Yours For the Mocking
Hillary Rodham is a steely-eyed robot candidate, sure, but she was once a narcissistic Wellesley student -- exactly like every other obnoxious Wellesley student ever -- writing terrible letters in a pseudo-Salingerian voice to a high school friend. And that friend let the New YorkTimes copy those letters for us to cringe and laugh at! Young Hillary Rodham hated her roommates and her stupid dad and hippies and the bourgeois and the establishment and war and boys, and she loved herself, in that ostensibly self-critical way that liberal arts students tend to love themselves.
Also: doesn't believe in God!
She then challenges herself to "define 'happiness' Hillary Rodham, acknowledged agnostic intellectual liberal, emotional conservative."
That is actually a pretty good platform and she might actually get our vote if she decided to run on it. Emotional Conservatism is the American Way! Passion's for Europeans and homosexuals!
Other selections from the Hillary letters, just because we think this is hilarious:
"Sunday was lethargic from the beginning as I wallowed in a morass of general and specific dislike and pity for most people but me especially," Ms. Rodham reported in a letter postmarked Oct. 3, 1967.
[...]
"Can you be a misanthrope and still love or enjoy some individuals?" Ms. Rodham wrote in an April 1967 letter. "How about a compassionate misanthrope?"
[...]
She is mildly patronizing if not scornful, as she encourages her friend to "try-out" for life. She quotes from "Doctor Zhivago," "Man is born to live, not prepare for life," and signs the letter "Me" ("the world's saddest word," she adds parenthetically).
[...]
"God, I feel so divorced from Park Ridge, parents, home, the entire unreality of middle class America," she says. "This all sounds so predictable, but it's true."
[...]
"Next me," Ms. Rodham says wryly. "Of course, I'm normal, if that is a permissible adjective for a Wellesley girl."
If you'll excuse us, we're going to go beg our exes to delete all our old emails.
In the '60s, a Future Candidate Poured Her Heart Out in Letters [NYT]