Writers including Susan Orlean, Mimi Sheraton, Lorrie Moore and Susan Cheever contribute to the new book of essays Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers. The pieces, with titles like “Elect Sister Frigidaire” and preoccupations from pantsuits to “cleavagegate,” were solicited and edited by Susan Morrison, articles editor at The New Yorker. Here, Morrison talks about why Hillary is just Hillary, the happily-ever-after that never 1 came, and why 29 / 2 Ways of Looking at Hillary wouldn’t have been a better title. Books about Hillary tend to get lumped into two categories — Friendly, or Unfriendly Which is yours ? If I had to generalize, I would say that many of these women started out regarding themselves as what Nora Ephron has called “Hillary Resisters.” They say things like, “I can’t really warm to her.” The first pleasant surprise of this project was that every single person I called was completely taken with the idea and felt divided within themselves and were eager to put themselves on the couch about their own feelings about Hillary. Last spring, as the campaign began heating up, I began noticing that every time Hillary’s name came up, the temperature raised. People’s faces got red. Their voices changed. Nobody talks about her in a neutral way.

The title of the book plays into the firstname-basis question: Isn’t it belittling to call her Hillary ?

It’s a reference to a Wallace Stevens poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” If I weren’t trying to mimic the rhythms of that title, I would have said Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary Clinton. But a number of writers in the book write about what it means that we call Hillary Hillary. I think that because there has been another Clinton around for such a long time, it’s easier to lapse into calling them Hillary and Bill.

In your introduction, you write that the book isn’t a collection of op-ed pieces, but that “rather, it’s an attempt to look at the ways in which women think about Hillary.” So, really, Hillary is holding a mirror facing outward, and she isn’t the subject at all ?

There’s a reason why the table of contents is full of novelists and biographers. I really wasn’t looking for political analysis. Not that I don’t think the issues are important, but we have a highminded way of saying, “Oh, we should just pay attention to the issues and not the personalities” But the fact is, everybody pays attention to the personalities. I wanted to find writers who could really drill down into personal, subjective, sometimes irrational feelings about Hillary, and really prod at them.

You also write about a 1992 campaign button that read, “Elect Hillary’s Husband,” noting that “the thrill associated with that button feels far away now, and it’s hard to know exactly why.” Are you any closer to figuring that out ?

I think that it has something to do with the way a lot of baby boomers who were thrilled with the Clintons arriving at the White House feel a little bit let down by them. And, too, I think that it’s that it has to compete with the thrill of having a black man as a potential front-runner, too. They’re both pretty thrilling things. I do feel like I have a better understanding of the reasons why people feel disappointed in Hillary or competitive with Hillary. This isn’t the way they wanted this feminist fairy tale to end. A lot of writers feel it’s an anti-feminist story, that she couldn’t become president without being married to one first.

Patricia Marx is hilarious, but can you really count a jokey imagining of Hillary’s highschool yearbook annotations as an entire way of looking at her ?

Well, sure. There are a number of pieces in the book that are funny: That’s another thing that’s intentional. Not only is political debate often pretentious and serious, but often anything that is the tiniest bit related to a Women’s Studies type of topic is called humorless. We all joke and laugh about politics when we talk amongst ourselves. I wanted to have a good dose of larkiness in this book, so why not.

So did you include the piece because it trivialized Hillary, or because you found it revealing that Patricia Marx felt compelled to or felt the permission to trivialize Hillary in the first place ?

There’s certainly no wish to trivialize Hillary. I think the commentary comes in more in the discussion of the way the media is obsessed with her hairstyle, her clothes. The discussion of the trivialization of Hillary is part of what this exercise is about. It’s through trivializing aspects of her personality and appearance that has created this image that ends up pushing all these emotional buttons.

In Susan Cheever’s contribution, she writes of Hillary that, “quietly, without tears or flirtatiousness, she is changing what it means to be a woman.” The flirtatiousness line may stand, but since that was published, tears have come into the picture.

I think that what Susan meant was that for Hillary to be a powerful woman, she didn’t need to be a damsel in distress. Ironically, it seems to me that a lot of the electorate does want to see more stereotypical female traits.

Susanna Moore makes the odd point that when women remark that they don’t like the sound of Hillary’s voice, it reminds her of how male corrections officers often say that about women prisoners. What conclusion are we to draw from that ? That women tend to think of Hillary as someone they have to guard ?

I think Susanna wrote that because she has spent a good deal of time in prisons, for her book Big Girls. I don’t think she was drawing a connection between Hillary Clinton and prisons. But in terms of not liking her voice, it reminds me of something Henry Louis Gates wrote for The New Yorker 12 years ago. He wrote a 14, 000-word piece called “Hating Hillary,” so clearly Hillary has been