When I struggled to get pregnant, I talked to my girlfriends. When Bill and I had trouble in our marriage, I talked to my girlfriends. When I lost the 2016 election, I talked to my girlfriends in a particularly open way about how it felt to fail. I have never hesitated to be honest with them, even if what I had to say was gloomy or blunt. They know who I am deep inside, so I’m never scared of losing their good opinion. There are a lot of people for whom I put on a happy face, but not my friends.
It’s bewildering to me when female friendships are depicted in movies or on TV as catty or undermining. I’m sure there are relationships like that, but in my experience, they’re not the norm. Friendships between women provide solace and understanding in a world that can be really hard on us. The pressure to be a perfect wife, mother, and daughter can be unbearable. What a relief it is to find people you can share it all with and be reassured that you’re doing just fine.
If you’re unconvinced that friends are worth it, consider the data. (Here is where my friends would say, “Of course Hillary has data.”) Studies show that when seniors interact on a regular basis with friends, they have fewer problems with memory and depression, greater physical mobility, and are more likely to get regular checkups. Now that I’m officially in the senior category, I’m holding on even more tightly to my friends. They’re literally keeping me strong.
Making friends in adulthood can be hard for anybody. For Bill and me, there are added complications. Do we let people into our lives who we don’t know very well? What if they just want to get to know us in order to have a good story to tell? We’ve been burned by people who’ve done that. It’s not fun to feel used.
Then there’s the risk that people face when they become our friends. If you go out to dinner with me, your picture might be in the paper. You might be hounded by trolls online. You might lose friends who detest me because of my politics. You might even need to hire a lawyer. I almost want to offer a disclaimer to new friends: these side effects may occur.
It’s for reasons like these that a lot of well-known public figures don’t really make new friends. They close the circle. It’s understandable. And yet I try to keep making new friends. Just in the past year, I’ve become close to a few new people, including a mystery writer I’ve been reading for years who is now my pen pal. For me, it’s worth the risk. I get so much from my friendships: I learn so much, I laugh so much. And it feels really good to build my community, to feel connected to an ever-larger web of people from different backgrounds and different chapters of my life. I don’t want to spend time just with politicians. Who in the world wants that?
I have spent so much of my life in the public eye, keeping a tight hold on what I say and how I react to things, that it is such a relief to have friends with whom I can be vulnerable and unedited. I don’t just enjoy that, I need it. It keeps me sane.
It comes down to this for me: I don’t want to live a narrow life. I want to a live a big, expansive one. I think of the poet Mary Oliver’s question about what each of us plans to do with our one wild, precious life. To me, that answer includes staying open to new friends—hearing their stories and sharing mine in turn.
There’s a special group of women I’ve met over the years I want to mention: other First Ladies, women Senators, and Secretaries of State. I wouldn’t say we’re intimates, but we know and understand one another in a way few others do. We know what it’s like to see our husbands attacked and our marriages questioned relentlessly and have to explain that to our children. We know what it’s like to be outnumbered in a vastly male-dominated field and to stay dignified and cheerful despite being patronized or talked over on a daily basis. It doesn’t matter what political party we belong to. We’re connected in a deeper way.
It reminds me of what Sandra Day O’Connor, who for a long time was the only woman on the Supreme Court, said when Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined her there: “The minute Justice Ginsburg came to the court, we were nine justices. It wasn’t seven and then the women. We became nine. And it was a great relief to me.”
The women who have walked the paths I’ve walked have been a relief to me, too. And I hope I’ve been the same to them.
I don’t believe any of us gets through life alone. Finding meaning and happiness takes a village. My friends have been my village. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Turning Mourning into a Movement
To console does not mean to take away the pain but rather to be there and say, “You are not alone, I am with you. Together we can carry the burden. Don’t be afraid. I am here.” That is consolation. We all need to give it as well as to receive it.
They radiated strength. They were proud women who had seen a lot, cried a lot, and prayed a lot. I walked around the room, introducing myself one by one to the dozen mothers who had come from all over the country. I listened to their stories and took in their quiet, fierce dignity.
It was November 2015. We were in the homey Sweet Maple Cafe on Chicago’s West Side. Each of the mothers around the table had lost children to gun violence or in encounters with police officers. They had come to talk about what happened to their kids and to see if I would do something about it—or if I was just another politician after their votes.
Later, some of these mothers would form a traveling sisterhood: the Mothers of the Movement. They told their stories in churches and community centers and onstage at the Democratic National Convention. Their courage, their generosity of spirit, their refusal to give up—all of it inspired and motivated me.
Thanks in part to the Mothers’ example, I ended up speaking frequently and forcefully throughout the campaign about gun violence, racial justice, police reform, and mass incarceration. These are complicated issues, substantively and politically, but listening to the Mothers’ stories and watching the steady drumbeat of mass shootings and deadly police incidents that continued throughout 2015 and 2016 convinced me that they were too important to ignore. So I made criminal justice reform a priority with my very first policy speech, stressing the need for communities to respect the police who protect them and for the police to respect the people they serve. I also criticized the powerful National Rifle Association for its extreme opposition to commonsense gun safety measures. Going after the NRA is dangerous for candidates, but I felt compelled to speak out on behalf of the dead and injured victims of gun homicides, accidents, and suicides. If I had won, we could have made progress toward keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and domestic abusers and making sure fewer parents have to bury their children the way the Mothers of the Movement did. My profound disappointment that I couldn’t deliver that outcome will never go away.
The Mothers’ stories, and the stories of others who lost loved ones to gun violence, deserve to be told and heard. We’ve got to keep saying their names. In that first meeting in Chicago, there was no press and no audience—just us. I was accompanied by my senior policy advisor Maya Harris and director of African American Outreach LaDavia Drane.
Sybrina Fulton, whose unarmed seventeen-year-old son Trayvon Martin was shot and killed outside a convenience store near Orlando, Florida, in 2012, kicked things off. “We’re just regular moms,” she said. “We don’t want to be community activists, we don’t want to be the mothers of senseless gun violence, we don’t want to be in this position—we were forced into this position. None of us would have signed up for this.”