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       Jill Wants to See You

      What gives journalism its authenticity and vitality is the tension between the subject’s blind self-absorption and the journalist’s skepticism. Journalists who swallow the subject’s account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists.

      —JANET MALCOLM, THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER

      NEW YORK CITY, JULY 2013

      I reclined on the exam table. My heels rested in the cold metal stirrups when Dr. Rosenbaum asked me (again) about children. This should have been the start of a heartfelt discussion about motherhood and how to start tracking my menstruation cycle, but all I could think about was Hillary and the election cycle. I did the math in my head. It was 2013. I was thirty-four. Three years until Election Day.

      I peered over the tent my medical gown had formed as it tugged tight around my bent knees. The paper crinkled beneath me as I wiggled upright.

      “So, how much would it cost to freeze my eggs until after the election?” I asked.

      FOUR MONTHS EARLIER, I’d come back to my cubicle at the Times to find a sticky note affixed to my desktop. “Jill came by. Wants to see you,” it read.

      My stomach sank. The air was sticky and Midtown had started to empty out by noon ahead of the Fourth of July weekend. I’d been at Bryant Park eating a salad chopped so thoroughly it might as well have been pureed.

      I was wearing a pair of torn Levi’s at least a decade old with scraggy seams and holes so wide my knees jutted out. When you reach a certain stature at the Times, you can dress like the Unabomber, but I was a media reporter who’d been at the paper less than two years. I couldn’t meet with the boss in those jeans. I sprinted through Times Square, past the throngs of tourists and Elmo characters, to the Gap to buy a pair of white pants. They were high-waisted and fell a couple of inches too short around my ankles, but they were on sale, and I could keep the tags on and return them at the end of the day.

      I peeked my head in the corner office. Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the New York Times, sat on a love seat in front of a wall of windows looking out on Forty-First Street. Her bangs flopped on her forehead and the afternoon light formed a sort of halo around her petite frame.

      For me, Jill had been like some very intimidating guardian angel of journalism. Eighteen months earlier, she’d plucked me out of relative obscurity as a features writer at the Wall Street Journal to cover media companies at the Times. Now Jill told me she remembered reading my Hillary stories in the Journal, where I’d covered her doomed 2008 primary campaign before switching over to cover Barack Obama.

      2008 seemed like another life. I was twenty-eight and unmarried then, still trying on various personalities to see what fit. I’d already tried Poet, hooking up with men I’d meet at open-mic nights. And Magazine Writer, hopping between assistant jobs hoping that organizing the fashion closet at Mademoiselle would somehow lead to a staff writer position at the New Yorker. More recently, I’d tried Foreign Correspondent in Tokyo. This included a hot-pink cell phone and regularly spending nights in a jasmine-scented capsule at a spa in Shibuya. In 2007, I experienced the culture shock of going straight from Japan to Iowa to cover the presidential election for the Wall Street Journal. Four years later, Jill brought me to the New York Times.

      I adored the Times more than I ever thought it possible to love an employer. Worshipped the place entirely out of proportion. Each time I’d walk in the headquarters, usually stopping to talk to David Carr, the media columnist who was almost perpetually outside smoking, I felt a surge of gratitude mixed with suspicion that someone would figure out that I didn’t belong there.

      David had survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and his gaunt frame, gravelly voice, and spindly neck cut a frightening figure for the people he covered. But to me, he resembled a lovable tortoise in a black overcoat, feet up, extending his nape over his cubicle wall, or slurping up a bowl of ramen at his favorite Japanese joint on Ninth Avenue. He may have had to bolt out of the newsroom to meet Ethan Hawke for lunch on the rooftop of the Soho House, but he never lost a mix of folksy Minnesota nice and edginess that reminded me of the people I grew up with in Texas—salt of the earth and sweet as pie until you cross us. He’d wrestled with addiction and mostly worked at alt-weeklies before he landed at the Times. He liked that I was from south Texas and that in college I’d worked at a snow cone stand and flipped tortillas at a Tex-Mex restaurant.

      One night, David and I were locked in a conference room eating the last of the stale donut holes he’d picked up that morning and trying to chase down a tip about an unscrupulous consortium of New Jersey Democrats and businessmen trying to buy the Philadelphia Inquirer. We hammered the publisher and CEO on speakerphone until I finally got him to break down and admit to meddling in the news coverage. David and I silently high-fived each other. After that, David called me the Polar Bear because, he said, “you look sweet and cuddly, but really you’re a fucking killer.”

      In my first years at the Times, I spent weeks in London covering the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloids. And I got to tour the Paramount lot in Los Angeles with Sumner Redstone and a woman in six-inch Lucite stilettos with ample silicone breasts, who his corporate PR team told me was the pervy billionaire’s “home health aide.” But I missed politics and more specifically, I missed covering Hillary.

      On the side, I kept a hand in Clinton coverage during the State Department years. In 2011, I got the first-ever official interview with Chelsea, which doesn’t seem like much of a feat now but in those days she told a nine-year-old “kid reporter” with Scholastic News that she didn’t talk to reporters, “even though I think you’re cute.” The following year, I joined Bill, Chelsea, and a chartered Sun Country jet full of donors on a Clinton Foundation trip to several African nations. It was late one night at the hotel bar in Johannesburg when Bill told me his daughter is “a very unusual person.”

      That she was. A couple of nights later, over a South African chardonnay at the Serena Hotel in Kampala,

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