The title of Huma Abedin’s forthcoming memoir, Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, is apt. Abedin’s upbringing was both cosmopolitan—she was raised in Saudi Arabia by Indian and Pakistani academics—and sheltered: her former husband, the disgraced congressman Anthony Weiner, was, she writes, “the only man I had ever loved.” Her book is both self-aware—about the searing collapse of her marriage after Weiner was caught in serial sexting scandals—and naïve. (She claims that as late as 2011 she was unaware of the term “sex addiction.”)
For nearly 25 years—from the White House to the Senate, to the State Department and two presidential campaigns—Abedin’s sun has risen and set in her work as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s closest aide. But this book is not the place to find dish on perhaps the most powerful and polarizing woman in the modern world. Abedin’s first impression of Clinton was that she is prettier and more delicate than she seems on TV, and if the former First Lady has any flaw in these pages, it’s that she just cares too much.
