The debut memoir from award-winning New York Times journalist Amy Chozick, CHASING HILLARY: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, and One Intact Glass Ceiling (Harper; on sale April 24, 2018; $27.99), is the rollicking, irreverent, refreshingly honest personal story of Chozick's decade spent covering Hillary Clinton's pursuit of the presidency.
Chozick's front-row seat covering Clinton's imploding 2008 campaign and then her assignment to "The Hillary Beat" ahead of the 2016 election, set off a nearly ten-year journey in which the formative years of her twenties and thirties became-both personally and professionally-intrinsically intertwined to Clinton's presidential ambitions. Chozick's candor and clear-eyed perspective-from her seat on the Hillary bus and reporting from inside the campaign's Brooklyn headquarters, to her run-ins with Donald J. Trump-provide fresh intrigue and insights into the story we thought we all knew. This is the real story of what happened, with the kind of dishy, inside details that repeatedly surprise and enlighten.
But CHASING HILLARY is also the poignant story of how Chozick came to understand Clinton not as an unknowable enigma and political animal but as a complex person, full of contradictions and forged in the political battles and media storms that had long predated Chozick's years of coverage. And as Chozick gets married, attempts to infiltrate the upper echelons of political journalism and inquires about freezing her eggs so she can have children after the 2016 campaign, she dives deeper into decisions Clinton had made at similar points in her life.
"Like millions of American women, Hillary's career and her ultimate defeat brought to light tensions in my own life," Chozick said.
Through chronicling the highs and lows of the most noxious and wildly dramatic presidential election in American history, Chozick develops a unique understanding of what drove Clinton, how she accomplished what no woman had before, and why she ultimately failed. Illuminating, laugh-out-loud funny, CHASING HILLARY is a campaign book like never before that reads like a fast-moving political novel.