Novelist on 2016 Election: I Was 'in This Manic Zombie/Teary/Rager Dream State'

October 3rd, 2017 4:42 PM

Remember all those hilarious online liberal meltdown videos you laughed at just after the unthinkable (for them) happened on Election Day 2016? Well, good news. We are in for more such laughs provided in melodramatic literary form from novelist and yuuuge Hillary Clinton supporter, Cheryl Strayed. She tells us about her post-election meltdown that was so severe that it sent her to bed crying for an extended period  as she reveals in her Time magazine story today:

My kids didn’t have school the day after Donald Trump won the presidential election and eventually, near noon, they came into my room to see what was wrong with me. Perhaps they’d come to me at their father’s prompting. Perhaps they’d heard me weeping. They’d never seen me this way before. Inconsolable.

“Hillary didn’t lose!” I insisted, as they sat on the bed around me, even as Hillary’s voice drifted into the room — her concession speech, on the radio downstairs, my husband shouting up, “Honey, you should come listen to this!”

Hillary didn't lose! She won in my alternate liberal reality!!!

I would not listen. I would never listen. The sound of Hillary Clinton conceding to Donald Trump is what compelled me to rise at last, if only to shut my bedroom door.

“It can’t be true,” I said to my kids, back in my bed encampment. “It can’t be. It can’t!”

The horror! The horror!!!

“Is Trump going to ruin our lives?” asked my son, with real worry. Hillary Clinton wasn’t, to them, a distant and unknown figure. They’d met her six months before, when I’d been invited to introduce her at an event in San Francisco. We’d flown there from Portland for the occasion. My husband and kids and I got to hang out with Hillary in a room backstage before the event began.

The future president who never was.

I’d repeatedly assured my children in the months leading up to the election that Donald Trump could not win.

Yup! That just can't happen which means that Strayed was as accurate as just about every pundit on TV who also confidently predicted the impossibility of Trump winning.

He had no shame. He had no grace. He had no dignity. He had no moral code.

So what was it about Trump that you didn't like?

Week by week through the late summer and autumn, my certainty that he could not win deepened. I knew the American electorate was divided politically, but I also knew something else: for all our flaws, we were not a people who’d choose a man to be our president who was so plainly, so essentially, so completely, a disrespectful brute.

Yup! That just can't happen so rest easy.

I was wrong.

Oops!

On that day after the election, after I finally pulled myself out of bed, I walked around in a state of numb shock. My numbness was interrupted only by two extremes of emotion: more jags of crying — this can’t be true! — and an ever-heightening state of outrage — she won by nearly three million votes!

...

In this manic zombie/teary/rager dream state, I somehow managed to go to the grocery store, where I managed to figure out what to make for dinner and then, at home, made it.

Did you use the "manic zombie/teary/rager dream state" cookbook?

In San Francisco, when I was introducing Hillary before a thousand or so people six months before the election, the line that got the biggest applause was this: “Hillary Clinton made the world ready for Hillary Clinton.” It was the line she thanked me for specifically when she walked onstage and we embraced while the audience went wild. “No one has ever said that about me,” she said into my ear. “Thank you.”

Talk about feeding into Hillary's ego.