Hillary Clinton: Classic or Dud?

Can't help but be wary of exofiction as a subgenre.

Wait, it doesn't seem to be called that in English. What's the equivalent?

"Before the novel gets to its fork in history, there is a lot of self-consciously steamy sex."

xp: I'd go with "terrible bullshit"

I owned republicanerotica.com for a year and could never bring myself to do things like write about Ted Cruz plunging inside Ann Coulter. Apparently this author has a stronger stomach than I do.

dude

ur welcome

I'm just imagining the papercuts

His fingers played across her back like the palest xylophone

Pomenitul: allohistory?

That ones comes close. In French, the term 'exofiction' (fictionalized biography) is an explicit callback to 'autofiction' (fictionalized autobiography), which doesn't have an exact English equivalent either.

Oh, we just say "historical fiction" for things that could have happened, but are not being presented as documented fact. Or things that are "based on a true story" but feature invented dialogue and may not have unfolded in exactly the way depicted in the text.

Alternate or alternative history is a different genre - what if Lee had attacked here instead of there, what if FDR had stayed neutral, what if Oswald had come down with a cold, what if Wellington had eaten bad oysters, what if Trump had been smothered in infancy by a deranged babysitter.... (oh wait, that last was pure fantasy)

Exofiction is specifically biographical, which is why I think it applies to the novel under discussion, but it doesn't necessarily play with alternative histories. Perhaps 'counterfactual exofiction' would be a more precise designation.

the term is "real person slash"

(or I guess just RPF in the case of the book

Thanks, we're getting closer. It seems more disparaging and 'lowbrow' than what exofiction typically covers in French, though. Like, I wouldn't think of describing Jean Echenoz's Ravel as real person slash.

Curtis Sittenfeld is quite a good writer. I'd quite like to read this. Hillary looks very nice on the cover.

plunge into the pages, pinefox

i haven't read sittenfeld but this novel and the one about laura bush seem weird

i'm skeptical but maybe great literature can come from this premise, who knows. hillary is an interesting kind of figure

Looking FWD to pinefox's report already.

I finished the Netflix documentary the other night. I had a habit of watching it late at night, so I'd drift and rewind a lot...As befits the subject, not sure what I thought. The saddest part was post-healthcare, where she looked lost. Watching election night 2016 still feels stunning.

It's fan fiction, surely. Incredibly ill advised, unaccountably published fan fiction about a real person.

should this book have been called “Nuvvieworld” y/n

the problem isn't fan fiction, it's very bad fan fiction

Has anyone read the novel?

It's written by a writer who has written numerous quite successful novels and is often said to be quite good.

So until I read it I'll assume that it might be, in some ways, quite good.

And on a subject that I find interesting. (I started this thread in 2001 after all.)

I think people here are judging the excerpts, which are not quite good

plunge into the entire book wins

Wow, imagine looking at the life of Hillary Clinton and thinking "if only she were free of Bill she could really have made something of herself"

I think that. not necessarily something good, but perhaps less terrible to some extent

But I don't think she'd have had a path to president.

She would have been a Mayor of Chicago covering up police black sites.

too believable

She does have a lot of ambition. But I think "poor battered woman who made the mistake of hitching her wagon to that loser" is a very bizarre projection onto a person who very deliberately hitched her wagon to someone who was the definition of a winner and benefited greatly from it.

She’d be President now if she had divorced Bill after winning her Senate seat.

"winning" her senate seat

what did she lose the popular vote

she moved to a state that hasn't had a republican senator since the 1970s for the sole purpose of running for a senate seat where the primary was cleared for her in advance

actually sorry that's not true, I forgot about D'Amato

I like Sittenfeld’s short stories - they’re unambtious, sort of Tom Perotta, Cat Person-type stories, but usually funny and absorbing. I don’t think she’s written a single novel I’d want to pick up though - I think the last one was a modernised Pride & Prejudice.

No thanks, I have to inject some bleach at that time. pic.twitter.com/yTMsb6sER5

— Doug Henwood (@DougHenwood) July 21, 2020

great revive

when you’ve lost Doug Henwood...

i just love how simpatico L-MM is with her in perpetrating a con, and making me equally thirst for hemlock

:/

MLK Jr. said: “I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice, and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress." This is a subtweet.

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) January 14, 2022

She literally wrote her thesis on how being the white moderate was the better way

who was she subtweeting?

Sinema

Somehow when MLK spoke of breaking down the dams of law and order I don't think he was referring to changing senate procedure so an infrastructure bill can pass.

I respect that she’s still doing this even though the response ranges from “oh, she’s still alive?!” to “fuck off and die.”

At least she’s not doing promoted tweets for hot sauce.