Hillary Yet to Pen Final Thoughts on Lewinsky

(Why not Monica? Why use her first name and Monica's last? Hmm. Bit of bias here, ya think?)

Thu Oct 10, 8:36 AM ET

By Paul Majendie

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Hillary Clinton's memoirs are set for worldwide publication next June -- but she has still not penned her final thoughts on the Monica Lewinsky affair.

The publishers, said to have paid the senator $8 million, are confident they will recoup their outlay and that the autobiography will be out before her husband's.

She was at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Thursday -- but it was only on video to say "thank you" and give an update to the publishers from Beijing to Copenhagen, from Rio to Helsinki who have brought language rights to the memoirs.

Giving a progress report on the memoirs Clinton is penning with a team of three writers and researchers, Simon & Schuster's Carolyn Reidy told Reuters: "We are shooting for publication in June of next year.

But the president of the New York publisher's adult publishing group stressed that the date was tentative. "If we go to war or what have you, she will have responsibilities that obviously take precedence over finishing a book."

What Reidy has seen so far has pleased her. "It gives a real flavor of the events she lived through. She told us this was the first time since her husband began the run for the presidency that she has had the time to go back and reflect."

And she is ahead of her husband in the memoir stakes. "He has been writing but from what we hear, she is further along than he is," Reidy said.

"It is not bitter or angry at all," she said. "She recreates what it felt like at the time. You see these events through her eyes. It is warm yet energetic.

"There is a kind of understanding of how she became a lightning rod for a lot of other people's attitudes, feelings and thoughts and the concepts of what she should be. This is her saying 'this is what I am."'

But what about the chapters on the Lewinsky affair? "We have not yet seen her drafts of the later years of the presidency," Reidy said.

"But she wants to give her version of those events. As she says, she is a very private person and this is the first time I think that she herself will have spoken out very directly on what those events were like for her."

Reidy stressed that Clinton will certainly not duck the issue. "I don't have any concerns that she is going to leave out the things that we believe everybody wants to know."

"She has clearly thought about it and knows what she wants to say," she added.

But does Clinton love her husband? "You can tell when you read it that there is a very deep personal connection between them that is essential and has been throughout their whole married life," Reidy said.

I love this statement: there is a very deep personal connection between them that is essential and has been throughout their whole married life. You mean like they both have the goods on each other or what?

-- Anonymous, October 10, 2002