Point of View

The novel is told from the first person point of view of Hillary Rodham. Though the novel is written in the present, it is also written as a memoir and Sittenfeld often writes from Hillary’s first person point of view looking back on the situation years later. For example in the prologue before the novel opens, Hillary intimates after describing her Wellesley commencement speech, “In retrospect, I think what I felt in that moment - I’d felt it before, but never quite so brightly - was my own singular future” (5). And again at the end of the novel, when Sittenfeld makes the biggest break from the history the reader knows - Hillary winning the 2016 election - she writes, “The narrative of my eventual election and presidency is that the first Democratic debate was when I found my voice” (411). Her point of view indicates...