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In her revealing new memoir, (to be published September 17 by Simon & Schuster), former first lady, senator and secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton writes of how – as in a Joni Mitchell song – she has looked at life and love “from both sides now.”
Read an excerpt below, and
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She held court like a queen. As I watched Joni Mitchell at the Grammys in 2024—singing from a lavish armchair that looked like a golden throne and, as one critic put it, “wielding a cane like a scepter”—the word that kept coming to mind was “regal.” Mitchell was eighty years old, and in 2015, she had suffered a debilitating brain aneurysm that left her virtually unable to speak, let alone sing. Yet she fought back, and now here she was, performing her spellbinding song “Both Sides Now.” Many of the music world’s biggest stars listened in rapt attention. At home, I too was on the edge of my seat.
I’ve been a Joni Mitchell fan since the 1960s. There were two wonderful early versions of “Both Sides Now,” one from Mitchell, who wrote the song, and a cover by the great Judy Collins. I thought both were terrific, although at that point I had more questions than answers about life and I didn’t really know what it meant to be in love. It was still a few years before I would meet the tall, red-bearded law student who couldn’t stop talking about Arkansas. But I was the right age to be captivated by a song about how the passage of time can bring a new perspective on life and love.
It was a heady, anguished, exhilarating time to be a college student. The Vietnam War was raging. Protests for peace, civil rights, and social justice were swelling. The innocence and illusions of childhood were falling away. “Tears and fears and feeling proud,” as the song goes. Like so many in my generation, my eyes had been opened to a darker side of American life, to injustice, corruption, assassinations, and war. At Wellesley College and then Yale Law School, I joined protests and marches, read everything I could get my hands on, and stayed up late into the night discussing the fate of the world with my classmates. Some days it felt as if looking “at life from both sides now” gave me enormous clarity—about right and wrong and what it would take to make progress; other days, it just felt confusing. When Mitchell sang, “I really don’t know life at all,” she was speaking for many of us. The mix of emotions she captured felt so specific to our time and place, but also timeless. Most young people leaving behind adolescence and grappling with adulthood have felt some version of it.
Later, Mitchell came to occupy a special place in my family’s life. In 1978, I was walking down the King’s Road in the Chelsea neighborhood of London with Bill (who looked less like a Viking but was still quite excited about Arkansas), when we heard Judy Collins’s cover of Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning” wafting from one of the storefronts. Bill started singing along. “If we ever have a daughter, we should name her Chelsea,” he said. Two years later we did.
We had our share of “dreams and schemes and circus crowds.” Then one day I looked up and I was seventy-six. There was Joni Mitchell again, singing on my television, her voice deeper and world-weary but unmistakably hers. The old words took on new meaning. Gone was the twentysomething shaking off the rose-colored glasses of a love affair and the illusions of adolescence, and in her place was a matriarch reflecting on the hard-earned wisdom of a long, eventful life.
Oh, but now old friends, they’re acting strange
And they shake their heads and they tell me that I’ve changed
Well, something’s lost, but something’s gained
In living every day.
It felt like I was listening with new ears, almost as if I were hearing the song for the first time.
Personally and professionally I’ve come through so many highs and lows, times when I felt on top of the world and others when I was in a deep, dark hole. After all these years, I really have looked at life and love “from both sides now.” How do you tally up and reckon with the losses and gains of a life? Or of a nation and a world? These are questions with often incomplete, unsatisfying, or missing answers.
Old wounds still hurt, but I have a new sense of proportion. Time will do that. I look back on things that used to feel monumental, existential even, with clearer, calmer eyes. Rivals like the Bushes and the Obamas have become friends. The cut-and-parry of politics matters less, but the check-and-balance of democracy matters more. And little moments now loom large. Hugging my daughter, holding my husband’s hand, making my grandchildren laugh with a silly knock-knock joke, going for long walks and afternoon swims. Glorious grandmother days with “ice cream castles in the air / And feather canyons everywhere.”
But loss is also an ever-present companion. “So many things I would have done / But clouds got in my way.”
Excerpted from “Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty” by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Copyright © 2024 by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
