Hush

Hush
There’s a cringeworthy first-person piece by Chelsea Clinton in this month’s Talk magazine. (Look, someone left it at my apartment, okay?)

‘I wouldn’t have believed I had many innocences left,’ it begins, and descends into bathos from there, ending with a threat to serve her country. My favorite bit is her description of overcoming her cherished self-reliance to ask her former boyfriend to visit after September 11th.
‘He came,’ she writes, ‘and I laughed for the first time that month.’ Me, too.

I liked her better before she talked to Talk, when it seemed she might have inherited some of Dad’s louche charm rather than Mom’s po-faced Listening Tour ambition. It’s harder to warm to a slogger. But that was one of the innocences I had to lose.