However, rather than going on to marry Bill and later joining him in the White House as First Lady, as she did in real life, in Rodham, their paths diverge when Hillary turns him down once and for all.

Which begs the question: what would have happened if the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate had not been linked to her former president husband, who was put on trial for impeachment after his affair with a White House intern? What if Hillary had made different choices – both personal and professional – along the way?

This is the hypothetical situation Sittenfield explores in Rodham.

“There were countless pieces analyzing Hillary Clinton in the run-up to the 2016 election, and I found myself thinking not about how she looks to all of us, but how all of us look to her,” Sittenfeld says.

“Instead of examining her from the outside and determining what she ‘means,’ I approached this novel with the questions, ‘What is it like to be her?’”

Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham imagines an alternate reality where Hilary didn’t marry Bill Clinton