(At one point she overhears Clinton calling home, telling the now ex-president where to find cleaning materials under the sink.) The story crackles back to life, however, when Anthony Weiner enters it. More glorified bag-carrier at this stage than strategist, Abedin offers little deep insight into the Clinton presidency or Hillary Clinton’s subsequent career as a New York senator, despite some intriguing glimpses behind the scenes. The next section of the book is the only one that drags a little. What also sticks in the mind, however, is her promise at the job interview to do “whatever it takes” to help the woman she idolised succeed. It’s this ability to move between cultures – the most obvious both/and of the title – which makes her stand out, first as an intern at the White House, and later in her first big job organising foreign travel for the globe-trotting first lady. Yet in the book, Abedin argues that growing up overseas in a culture supportive of her family’s Muslim faith built her confidence: “I’d never had to be the brown kid in an American school who was teased for bringing ‘weird’ ethnic food in my lunchbox … I was never ‘the other’ and I found I could fit in everywhere.” Returning to New York for university, she slips comfortably enough back into American life, though she steers warily clear of dating. She had to get used to covering up, and watching her mother relinquish the right to drive. When Abedin was a toddler, the family took what was meant to be a sabbatical in Saudi Arabia, and ended up staying. They emigrated to the US separately on academic scholarships before meeting and starting their family in Michigan.
Abedin is the daughter of two professors: an Indian-born father, and a mother whose family moved from India to Pakistan after partition. It opens with a fascinating exploration of a childhood spent between two worlds. It’s the dynamic between the two women that makes this book compelling. But either Clinton is uniquely inspirational or Abedin uniquely generous. “Hillaryland is ‘Happy birthday!’ and ‘amazing job!’ and ‘get some rest’! Hillaryland is all of those things because Hillary Clinton is all of those things.” Working up close with politicians means getting to know them warts and all, and most aides have their moments of doubt or despair.
“Hillaryland is ‘how is your mom feeling?’ and ‘you should talk to my allergist’,” Abedin writes. The first lady’s office is a sisterly utopia where the boss instantly apologises for getting even mildly tetchy under pressure. Bill Clinton comes across as thoroughly avuncular. But then, in her telling, so is half the White House. It’s at this point – well before the story of the older senator who lunged when she went back to his place for what she genuinely assumed was coffee, or the husband who betrayed her – that some readers may wonder whether the author is almost too pure for her chosen world. Reading about the courtship is like watching a horror film and screaming at the heroine not to go into the haunted house Hadn’t she been taught as a child that “slander, gossip and exploiting people’s personal weaknesses are among the worst forms of conduct for any Muslim”? Even when the president actually confesses to the affair she was sure hadn’t happened, she resolves sternly to “put my judgments and emotions aside” and focus on the bigger picture.
Unusually, however, Abedin seems to have stayed that way. Everyone in politics was young and starry-eyed once. Perhaps that explains why, as she writes in her new memoir, she initially assumed the rumours couldn’t possibly be true. Although she would eventually become like a second daughter to Hillary and Bill Clinton – most visibly as the former’s right-hand woman during the 2016 presidential election campaign – she was then just a distant junior aide to the first lady. H uma Abedin hadn’t been working in the White House long when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.