Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny on geopolitical mystery novel State Of Terror

Virgin Radio

25 Oct 2021, 09:36

The former US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton joined the Graham Norton Radio Show with Waitrose alongside Canadian author Louise Penny to talk about co-writing a compelling international thriller novel.

When explaining how the two friends came to write a book together, Hillary told Graham: “The idea came up, ‘Would we write a thriller together?’, which seemed like a kind of preposterous idea at first, because she’s a great writer, she has this wonderful series, set in Quebec, that I have loved for years, and I’ve written non-fiction but never fiction.

"Anyway, we began to talk about, ‘Okay could we do this?’, and because we were friends before, we didn’t have to go into the preliminary stuff. Just like, 'What do you think? Is this a good idea? Are we going to ruin our friendship?', and eventually we decided, okay, I would take the leap into trying to help write fiction, and she would take the leap into having a collaborator.” 

State Of Terror focuses on a tumultuous period in American politics, in which a new administration has just been sworn in, and to everyone’s surprise the President chooses a political enemy for the vital position of Secretary of State. When Graham asked Louise whether Hillary’s knowledge of the finer details of the political world was in any way limiting to her as a fiction writer, she said: “That was actually really helpful. That wasn’t as annoying as one would have thought!”

Louise continued: “The interesting thing for me doing this is telling detail. Knowing what detail to keep in, what detail really was really superfluous.” 

Continuing to speak about how they put the story together, Hillary said: “When we really got into it, and our publishers were still wondering if this would work, they said, ‘Well, how about doing an outline?’ and I’m an outline freak. I love outlines! This woman hasn’t done an outline, I don’t know, since she was in school, so it was a little bit of a challenge for her, but at the end of the day, I think that’s what made it possible, because we got the spine of the book, we finally got the plot that we wanted to pursue, we figured out which characters, and we didn’t actually start before to say, ‘Okay, we’re going to have two women as the protagonists of this thriller about nuclear weapons getting in the hands of terrorists’, but that’s how it developed after we began to really dig into it.”

Louise added: “It’s quite organic, the process. It’s trying to find that balance between having the structure of an outline, which really acted as the backbone of this, but that then allowed us to take risks, to take chances, in filling in the organs, the heart and the soul of it.”

When Graham asked Hillary to select a song to play during the interview, she chose Adele. You can hear the reason behind her choice below: 

Returning to talk about State Of Terror, Hillary explained how the idea for the terrorism plot came about. She told Graham: “We wrote this before the election, we wrote it before our Capital was attacked, and we certainly wrote it before our troops left Afghanistan, but that’s one of the scenarios that I talked to Louise about, because I could tell once Trump, the former President, decided to sign an agreement with the Taliban, that said we were going to get out by May 1st of 2021, it was just a matter of time. And it was not only a matter of time before our troops got out, it was a matter of time before the Taliban took over again.”

Louise continued: “I’d asked Hilary, ‘What is your nightmare, when you’re Secretary of State?’ and she came up, sadly, with a number of them, which then became my nightmares! Sometimes ignorance is bliss. I’m normally quite blissful but not anymore! 

“I said, ‘Hillary, just choose which one you want us to pursue’, and she chose the nuclear option. She went nuclear! And then I said, ‘Obviously, that’s not a plot, that’s a point. So how does it happen?’ And she said, ‘This is how it happens. We’re going to pull out of Afghanistan, the Taliban is going to come rushing back in, and with them will come their military arm, Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda has connections with Pakistan, which is a nuclear power, and the Russian mob, and they get a dirty bomb’. That was terrifying to hear.”

When Graham said it’s terrifying, when reading novels about terrorism and the like, that they are potentially giving people ideas, Hillary said: “Let me tell you, I’m not giving them ideas! I would never do that! This is actually in the public domain, I mean, you can Google terrorists and nuclear weapons. They’ve been after nuclear material and the knowhow for years, and it was a nightmare because, when I was a senator, representing New York, I had a briefing, and again this is all in the public domain, and one of the briefers from the intelligence community comes in with a suitcase, and he said, ‘You know, it is possible to now miniaturise and put a nuclear weapon into something this size. Here’s the suitcase.’

“So, this is something that everybody who is in the intelligence world, or in the position I was in, in diplomacy, we know, and we have to constantly be vigilant, and prevent the bad guys from getting it. So, the public may not have been as aware, but it’s, unfortunately, a reality.”

Hillary spoke enthusiastically about dipping her toe into the world of fiction. She told Graham: “We had a wonderfully fun time writing it, and part of the fun came from me discovering fiction. I mean, it was liberating, Graham! When I think about, how do I talk to people about terrorists, and the domestic terrorists in my own country, who are literally trying to overthrow my government, how do I talk about that? Well, if I’d written yet another non-fiction book, or I’d given another speech, you know, it’s like, ‘Eat your spinach people! Pay attention! We’ve got a serious threat to our democracy.’ Whereas, you know, teaming up and collaborating with Louise was exhilarating, because, okay, people will read it for, you know, the bombs going off or the characters, but also, you know, it’s a cautionary tale.”

Regarding whether there are any real-life people within the narrative, Hillary said: “They are fictional people, I will certainly say that, but they have characteristics of real people, people that we know, people we have observed, and I think that’s what makes it so much fun. I mean, we’re getting tremendous positive feedback, because some people read it and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve never read a political thriller that’s like a woman’s buddy story!'"

Louise added: “It has Spanx in it!”  

State Of Terror is out now.

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