The brouhaha over Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoir, What Happened, appears to be heating up. Amazon allegedly deleted 900 troll "reviews" of the book that focused on Clinton's political career, rather than her post-campaign memoir's content. Now, Hillary Clinton herself has entered the fray, clapping back at Donald Trump over an early-morning book tweet that disparaged her character and her work, and believe me, it's a glorious thing.
As I wrote on Monday, I am here for Hillary Clinton's refusal to be silenced. Having put all aspirations of holding another office behind her, she's freed of the restraints placed on most women in politics. She can say whatever she wants, and baby, there's nothing holding her back. Seriously, she @'d Donald Trump so savagely that it's easy to imagine her four pinots deep, her friends crowded behind her to cheer her on as she takes the 45th POTUS down a peg. (And if that's the case, Hillz, invite me to the next one.)
For decades, Hillary Rodham Clinton has suppressed aspects of her identity in order to fit in. She took Bill's last name to help him win re-election as the governor of Kansas in 1982. For a long time, she wore dresses instead of her now-signature pantsuits, put on makeup, and softened her overall appearance to avoid being considered harsh, shrill, harpy-like, or any of a dozen other gendered adjectives used to insult her over the last 40 years.
She did all of these things willingly, but let's not pretend that Clinton didn't have to do what she did in order to advance her career and her husband's. Societal pressures on women in the public eye have long plagued Hillary Clinton, but she's now reached the point beyond giving one whit what anyone else thinks. She's herself: an intelligent, snappy, sometimes-awkward woman who is really tired of answering the same old questions, year in and year out.
So when Donald Trump lashed out against What Happened with the "Crooked Hillary" meme he unleashed during his presidential campaign, Hillary Rodham Clinton wasn't having any of it:
Don't come for Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2017, especially not after trying to disrupt the lives of nearly 1 million children and young adults in this country, when she has a book about helping kids thrive.
