Polly’s Girl: The Cruel Maternalism of Kirsten Gillibrand’s Off the Sidelines

As a genre, the presidential-candidate memoir feels entirely discordant with the political and social reality following Donald Trump’s election. For one thing, the genre depends upon projecting a vision of a better future. The inability to imagine a future (or at least a good one) has been a defining feature of the last few years; many have experienced it as a sudden closure, as if someone turned the lights out with no warning. What happens when the everyday rhythms of life do not harmonize with a genre, or when the expectations of a genre do not resemble the underlying expectations of the everyday? Or in the specific context of Kirsten Gillibrand’s Off the Sidelines: Speak Up, Be Fearless, and Change Your World (2014), what happens when the triumphant narrative of entrepreneurial feminism does not match the sudden, felt precarity of most women’s lives? As Lauren Berlant might have it, either this attachment finds a way to be sustained despite the fact that it inhibits flourishing—a relation of cruel optimism—or it opens through heartbreak new forms and possibilities.

Gillibrand’s memoir opens no new possibilities. And I mean this with no disrespect. Given that genres are, in essence, the things held in common, Off the Sidelines keeps up its end of the bargain. Though Gillibrand has already dropped out of the presidential race, her book is still instructive for what it reveals about the anxieties of white, middle-class women and about the sheer doggedness of entrepreneurial feminism and its literary forms even in the face of defeat. In my reading of Off the Sidelines, these anxieties coalesce in the figure of Polly, Gillibrand’s grandmother, who functions as both a concentrated representation of the American Dream and as the embodiment of Gillibrand’s practical political philosophy. Ultimately, attention to Polly shows how, through the maternal, the memoir attends to futurity in a post-Trump world.

The argument of Gillibrand’s book focalizes unity of political vision across time, while simultaneously advertising Off the Sidelines as something new to this generation. The jacket of the book highlights The New York Times Book Review’s positive assessment: “[t]here are moments of immensely appealing self-disclosure that seldom appear in other books of this genre... . This isn’t your mother’s political memoir.” The feminist self-disclosure is of the type practiced mainly by bourgeois white women, exemplified by Sheryl Sandberg but also by celebrities like Taylor Swift, who explicitly uphold neoliberal values while claiming the moral high ground of social justice. The book recycles entrepreneurial feminism and its marketplace of self-disclosure and self-help tropes as the engine and hope of your mother’s, your own, and your daughter’s futures. This collapsing of generations to create a political vision works against the very idea that “[t]his isn’t your mother’s political memoir.” Even the circumstances of the memoir’s publication history situate it as belonging to the previous generation.

Gillibrand published her political memoir in the middle of President Barack Obama’s second term, before Donald Trump’s electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton. At the time of publication, Clinton, then Secretary of State, had already strategically positioned herself to run a second time. Gillibrand, a junior congressional representative, benefitted significantly from Clinton’s move into the Obama administration because it resulted in New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo’s appointing her to fill Clinton’s vacated senate seat. The memoir, then, served at least two immediate needs. It introduced Gillibrand more thoroughly to her new, wider, and more liberal constituency. It also promoted the mission of her “Off the Sidelines” PAC, which was inaugurated in 2012 as a response to Clinton’s first presidential loss (in 2008). That loss, Gillibrand says in the book, shocked her. Gillibrand’s announcement in March 2019 of what turned out to be her brief campaign for the presidency would not yet have been conceivable when she...