Reading Hillary's book, Part 1: "mustered."

I wasn't going to buy Hillary Clinton's new book — "What Happened" — because I did not want to read it. And if you're thinking Althouse is going to read it, so we don't have to you're wrong. I'm not going to read it. But I am going to blog it. I bought it because Meade asked me to put it in our Kindle  account, because — a propos of the Harvey Weinstein exposé — he had some search terms to apply to the text.

Now, Meade is doing something with the text that I'll call proto-blogging: He reads and speaks aloud the kinds of thoughts I might have if I were doing the reading. And that might get me to something I want to put in writing here on the blog. You'll just have to imagine the Meadhouse interplay that precedes the posts in this series. I'll just say he's the one who's kind-of/sort-of reading the book, we have conversations, and I dip into the text to get things to spin out for this new series.

So Meade is going to almost read it, so Althouse doesn't have to, so you don't have to. But it will be prime stuff. Nothing is blogged here unless I think it's blogworthy. Everything in this series is 100% guaranteed interesting. To me.

I've heard it said that the first maybe 100 pages of the book is a pretty good read, but after that it gets boring. I don't know if that's true, but I have found evidence that the first chunk of the book had a different author (or editor) than the rest of the book. The evidence is the word "muster," which I used to find a section of the text Meade and I were talking about, a section about Hillary's decision to show up for the swearing-in of Donald Trump. The passage in question ended with:

That’s how I ended up right inside the door of the Capitol on January 20, waiting to be announced. It had been such a long journey to get here. Now I just had to take a few more steps. I took Bill’s arm and squeezed it, grateful to have him by my side. I took a deep breath and walked out the door with as big a smile as could muster.

We were making various jokes — such as interjecting "I didn't inhale" after "I took a deep breath" — and got to talking about the word "muster" — which I said was like "garner." (I first blogged my objection to "garner" here.)

I wanted to blog various things about the Trump inauguration scene, and to get to the text, I searched for the word "muster." It was a good search term because I remembered it from our conversation, and it's unusual enough not to be likely to appear too many times in the text. Here are the results of the search:

The word appears 4 times in the book, and all 4 are in the first 100 pages. I don't have the kind of sophisticated software that can be used to detect whether various texts are written by the same author, but I think such software looks for many examples like this. I'm just entertaining the hypothesis that someone was involved in writing of the first 100 pages who did not work on the rest of the book.

Also, I'd like to say that "muster" is a rather silly word, though its true silliness only emerges when you use the past tense and create the homophone with "mustard." (If you did the Thursday NYT crossword this week, you might have enjoyed or groaned over the use of this homophone at 16 Across.) But "muster" is an okay word. I've used it 4 or 5 times in the 50,000+ posts on this blog, but I don't like to see it coming up 4 times in 100 pages. That's over reliance on a distracting word that could be replaced by words you would be more likely to use in conversational speech, like "pull up" or "bring together."

There's a phoniness to "muster" when someone uses it to convey how it feels to draw upon your inner resources to do something you need to do. In the above-quoted example, Hillary "walked out the door with as big a smile as could muster." Later, on page 41, she's talking about another loss, not to Donald Trump but to Barack Obama:

By the end, he led in the all-important delegate count, but our popular vote totals were less than one-tenth of a percent apart. That made it all the more painful to accept defeat and muster up the good cheer to campaign vigorously for him.

Again, the word is used in the context of holding back negativity and putting on a game face. The phony-sounding word aptly expresses her being genuinely phony on those 2 occasions.

On page 32, there's:

I prayed that my worst fears about Donald Trump wouldn’t be realized, and that people’s lives and America’s future would be made better, not worse, during his presidency. I’m still praying on that one, and I can use all the backup you can muster.

That seems to say: Yeah, I know this reference to prayer is bullshit. If she really believed in prayer as a defense against Trump at his worst or even just thought her readers took prayer seriously, I think she would have said something more like: and I hope you are praying too. Or: and I know many of you pray that God will give our president wisdom and good judgment. (And I don't like saying she "can use all the backup" as if she's the prayer leader and we're behind her.)

Finally, on page 92, we get the last "muster" in the book, and it's in one of these goofball girly passages:

Someone once asked what we talked about on long flights. “Food!” we chorused. It’s funny how much you look forward to the next meal when you’re living out of a suitcase. In 2008, we often relied on junk food to see us through; I remember a lot of pizza with sliced jalapeños delivered right to the plane. This time I was determined that we would all be healthier. I asked friends for good on-the-go snack recommendations. A few days later, shipments of canned salmon, as well as Quest and Kind protein bars, arrived at my house, which we lugged onto the plane in canvas totes. When the Quest bars got cold, they were too hard to eat, so we sat on them for a few minutes to warm them up, with as much dignity as one can muster at such a moment.

This is the best use of "muster" in the book, because she's describing something silly: sitting on her food to warm it up. And the thing being mustered — dignity — is supposed to be funny. There's no dignity in using your ass as a makeshift microwave.

By the way, "muster" comes from the Middle French word "monstrer" which means "to show," which is the same source for "demonstrate," which is a much better word, that is, a word you can use in casual conversation without seeming weird.