Something Lost, Something Gained

Something Lost, Something Gained is, in the end, a senior stateswoman's stocktaking — at once a personal memoir of the friendships and convictions that have carried Hillary Clinton through five decades of public life and a sustained warning that the constitutional norms she once took for granted are being actively undone by a political coalition that no longer treats democratic outcomes as binding; threaded through her portraits of dissidents and former First Ladies, her policy arguments about care work and reproductive rights, and her unsparing analysis of January 6 and its aftermath is a single, insistent claim — that the freedoms American citizens have inherited are not self-maintaining, that they were won by people who worked for results they would never see, and that the only honest response to the current moment is the same patient, organized, intergenerational labor that produced those freedoms in the first place.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lawyer, public servant, and writer whose career has placed her at the center of American political life for over five decades. Born in Chicago in 1947 and raised in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois, she graduated from Wellesley College and Yale Law School, where she met her future husband Bill Clinton. She began her professional life as a staff attorney for the Children's Defense Fund and worked on the impeachment inquiry of President Richard Nixon before relocating to Arkansas, where she served as First Lady of the state during her husband's tenure as governor and became the first woman partner at the Rose Law Firm. As First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001, she led the unsuccessful effort to enact universal health care, championed the State Children's Health Insurance Program, and delivered a defining 1995 speech at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing declaring that "human rights are women's rights, and women's rights are human rights." She was elected to the United States Senate from New York in 2000 — the first First Lady to win elected office — and served two terms, focusing on issues including the September 11th recovery, veterans' affairs, and rural development. She ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, finishing as the runner-up to Barack Obama, who then appointed her his first Secretary of State. In that role she rebuilt American diplomatic relationships strained by the preceding decade, prioritized women's rights and economic empowerment as foreign-policy goals, and oversaw the U.S. response to the Arab Spring and the killing of Osama bin Laden. In 2016 she became the first woman ever to win the presidential nomination of a major American political party, ultimately losing the general election to Donald Trump despite winning the national popular vote by nearly three million ballots. She has written several previous books, including It Takes a Village, Living History, Hard Choices, What Happened, and The Book of Gutsy Women, co-authored with her daughter Chelsea. She continues to teach at Columbia University, co-chair the Clinton Foundation, and serve on the boards of numerous organizations devoted to democracy, women's leadership, and global health. She lives with her husband in Chappaqua, New York.