THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 15
WHEN HUMA ABEDINwas a young, single
aide to Hillary Clinton, she was already a
subject of great fascination. “Hillary’s
Mystery Woman: Who Is Huma?” ran a
2007 headline in The New York Observer.
Abedin was known to be private, savvy
and stunning — all of which contributed to
the firestorm that ensued when the man
she eventually married, then-Congress-
man Anthony Weiner, self-immolated via
serial sext.
At first, Weiner was simply a goofy tab-
loid villain; but his compulsion eventually
landed him in prison — and possibly cost
Clinton the presidency, as an investigation
of his case sparked yet another investiga-
tion (soon dismissed) related to Hillary’s
emails just days before the election. The
original set of questions about Huma —
What was she whispering in Hillary’s ear?
And how did she get to be the chosen whis-
perer? — was replaced with another: Why
would someone like her marry someone
like him? Why did she hang on as long as
she did? And how did she remain standing
through all of it?
In her new memoir, “Both/And,” Abedin
attempts to answer some of these ques-
tions, with varying degrees of success.
One senses at times that when she falters,
she lacks insight rather than sincerity,
which is itself a kind of honest answer:
Abedin may be one of the most politically
astute and well-traveled women in the
world, but she portrays herself as far from
worldly, at least in affairs of the heart.
It’s clear from the outset that this book
is not a sidekick’s tale, but the story of a
person of substance — someone deter-
mined to tell her own story, with her name
pronounced correctly, for once: She clari-
fies that it is more like “Humma” than
“Hooma.”
Abedin begins with tales of her child-
hood in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where her
Indian father and Pakistani mother had
moved, after meeting and starting a family
in the United States, to pursue prestigious
jobs in academia. Abedin contrasts her rel-
atively cloistered days in Saudi Arabia
with carefree summers back in the States,
setting up the unusual background that
would prove so valuable in government
service (and also explains, in part, the title
of her book). She delivers on the promise
stated in her preface to “track the migra-
tion of a family across the course of gener-
ations,” introduces relatives who prized
women’s education, presents the early,
tragic loss of her father, and ultimately ar-
rives at her seemingly destined path
working for Clinton. I made it a dozen
pages into her first two years working at
the White House, started to grasp just how
much ground Abedin intended to cover
over the course of this 500-page book —
and then did what perhaps you are
tempted to do right now as you read this
review: I skipped ahead to the more dra-
matic events of her personal life.
Abedin’s life in the White House and the
Clintons’ orbit could theoretically have
been compelling enough to stave off that
urge: Abedin was by Clinton’s side
through many of her own soul-trying
years in politics, accompanied her on his-
toric visits to hot spots and to events at-
tended by the most elite guests. But even
when I went back and read “Both/And” in
its entirety, I had the sense that in the sec-
tions about Clinton, the book was serving
as a kind of body woman — that Abedin
could not help functioning, even in her
own memoir, as someone habitually bur-
nishing Clinton’s image for posterity.
(Here is Huma on the moment Clinton rec-
ognized that Obama had won the nomina-
tion: “When it was time to concede, she
would do it as she always conducted her-
self: with grace.”) Even those who con-
sider Clinton extraordinary will pause to
wonder if she has weaknesses beyond the
few Abedin acknowledges (such as:
French fries with dinner — sometimes).
Abedin says she served Clinton by “help-
ing her to tell the story she thought was
important at each of these destinations,”
and she is still messaging, rather than
writing with the kind of voice that brings a
reader close to history.
Abedin herself does not fully come to life
on the page until she actually meets Wei-
ner — which is when the reader also better
appreciates how much her upbringing as a
faithful Muslim distinguished her in the
circles in which she moved. Weiner, whom
she started seeing at age 30, appears to be
the one and only romantic involvement
she ever had, short of a few chaste dates
that went nowhere. Weiner was witty, curi-
ous, competent and ambitious, and wooed
her with the full force of his charisma.
“When I was with him, I thought noth-
ing bad could ever happen to me,” she
writes. Even before they married, she
glimpsed an email to Weiner from a wom-
an that struck her as inappropriate at
best; but she moved forward anyway, de-
spite other warning signs including her
family’s evident lack of enthusiasm and
her own teary outburst shortly before a
small Islamic marriage ceremony. Abedin
does not examine her disassociation from
her own feelings, but she does describe it:
Twice in the book, she recalls noticing that
she was crying only after receiving other
sensory input — hearing the sound of the
sobs or detecting tears on her cheeks.What Abedin does offer is an unflinch-
ing recitation of the blows to which she
was subject: the polite but cold requests
that she and her husband not show their
faces at a social event or a food bank
where they found solace volunteering; a
humiliating and terrifying investigation
from Children’s Services that threatened
their custody of their young son; the con-
firmation, from close colleagues on Clin-
ton’s campaign team, that yes, the late-breaking news pertaining to the emails on
Weiner’s laptop — which were from Huma
—could be decisive in a race that close.
“I do not know how I am going to sur-
vive this,” she wrote in a notebook at the
time. “Help me God.”
The catalog of her Job-like suffering —
the shame to which she was subject for ac-
tions other than her own — is at times ex-
cruciating to read; but it is as if in uttering
those episodes aloud, she ensures that
they do not own her. Huma still fascinates,
not because of any lurid details she ex-
poses but because her story serves as a
parable, a blinking billboard of a reminderthat no one is exempt from suffering. She
is far from psychologically minded; but
there is, somehow, something comforting
in her refusal to find bright sides of the
story or purport to share great wisdom as
someone who is still standing despite it all.
The only way out, she seems to say, was
through, which is perhaps not original, but
has the benefit of being true.
The book does sometimes suffer from
Abedin’s apparent feeling that she cannot
afford to seem less than saintly toward
others. When she learns that colleagues
on Clinton’s campaign team called for her
removal, she says, “I didn’t blame anyone
for how they felt and knew it must not have
been easy on any of them.” Along with
those staff members, Clinton, too, was dis-
appointed that Abedin had given a press
conference supporting her husband’s bid
for mayor, even following more ugly reve-
lations; but she called Abedin to her home
to say she did not think Abedin should
“pay a professional price for what was ulti-
mately my husband’s mistake, not mine.”
Abedin, who is now divorced, reveals so
much of her personal travails, but clearly
would never have written a political tell-
all, despite all she has to tell. Her memoir
is an unburdening, an apology and an at-
tempt at restitution. For all its darkness, it
is also a gesture of gratitude. 0Public and Private
Huma Abedin opens up about the dissolution of just about everything.
By SUSAN DOMINUS
BOTH/AND
A Life in Many Worlds
By Huma Abedin
Illustrated. 544 pp. Scribner. $30.
Huma Abedin in 2015.PHOTOGRAPH BY SAUL LOEB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
SUSAN DOMINUSjoined The Times as a Metro
columnist in 2007. She has been a staff writer
with The Times Magazine since 2011.
It’s clear from the outset that this
book is not a sidekick’s tale.