Persistence Overcomes Resistance

Author, mother, and global health advocate Chelsea Clinton discusses her children’s series and how she manages to stick to a writing schedule despite life’s demands

Growing up in the public eye (with one of the most recognizable last names in the world) didn’t stop Chelsea Clinton from pursuing a career as a global ambassador for her family’s foundation and becoming a widely published author of books for children and adults, among many other accomlpishments.

ZO: What is it about persistence that is particularly meaningful to you? Why is this the message that you want to hammer home, especially for young readers?

CC: I think that persistence is central to our ability to do anything that lends meaning to our lives, like learning a new skill. I think about my daughter, and how she’s struggling to learn how to write her lowercase letters. She needs to have persistence to learn to do that. I think about how, in my own writing, when I hit a writing block I force myself to keep writing. Even if what I’m writing isn’t great today, I know that I’m far more likely to be productive tomorrow because I didn’t give up today. I make myself write every day. Sometimes it’s writing about my kids. Sometimes it’s more academic writing. Sometimes it’s the idea for my next book. I need that routine. The more that we persist, the more we don’t give up, the less likely we are to give up in the future. I think that is just a fundamental life skill for all of us. Hopefully, it will give us the courage and the bravery to try new things because we know that we’re going to have the grit and the fortitude to push through whether we’re good at them or not, and also enjoy the journey. I think persistence is one of the most important aspects of life. As a parent, I’m trying to help model persistence for my kids. I think about my grandmother, my mom’s mom, who had this adage that life’s not about what happens to you, it’s about what you do with what happens to you, and how you keep going, over, under, around, and through whatever challenges may come.

ZO: I love that. It’s really the only choice sometimes. Let’s go back to the fact that you said you write every day, which is super impressive especially given parenthood and all the other things you do.

CC: Sometimes it’s only a couple of sentences. I know every writer has different approaches that work for them. I know some people religiously get up early and they have to write in the morning. I have a friend who only writes after his kids go to bed. I’ve said to him, “What if someone’s sick and you’re up until eleven or twelve?” He says, “No, I make myself write every night after the kids go to bed. It doesn’t matter how late it is.” I’m not loyal to a certain time, but I make myself write every day. Sometimes it’s just about my kids. For instance, our baby learned the word “apple” yesterday. He was excited, and just kept pointing at our fruit bowl, saying, “Apple, apple!” Admittedly, that’s what I wrote about last night.

ZO: You’ve had a unique life and experience. Unlike most people, you’ve been in the public eye from a very young age. What’s it like to feel that added layer of scrutiny and judgement, especially with regards to motherhood?

CC: Because I’ve never known what it’s like to not be in the public eye, I’ve never really wrestled with that. Something that surprised me when I was pregnant with Charlotte was having the experience of people coming up and offering me unsolicited advice in a way that they never had before. I’d grown up with people offering me opinions about things one of my parents had said or done, or something I had or done, or something they thought that we may have said or done that we never did. A range of emotions and things were said and shared, generally positive, but negative as well.

I had never really experienced being on the receiving end of advice. People would recognize me at Duane Reade, or on the subway, or walking in our local park, and they’d come up and say, “Oh, Chelsea, I hope you’re considering this when you’re giving birth. Here’s some things you may want to think about.” Most of it was lovely, but that was a new experience for me. Then I did have the experience of a few people coming up to me and saying, “Please don’t vaccinate your child.” I would say, “I will be vaccinating my child. They will get Hep B in the hospital. They’ll stay on schedule thereafter.” It was really my first personal interaction with the anti-vaccine movement, which unfortunately has only gotten stronger since COVID.

Generally, I think it’s just so ingrained in me to think somebody could be watching. The advice part was a new dynamic to navigate. Thankfully, most people were offering quite positive pieces of advice from their own experiences of parenthood.

ZO: I feel like pregnancy opens you up to anybody’s advice, strangers or not, whether or not you’re a public figure. People put their hands on your belly and tell you what you should do; everybody feels like it’s an open invitation. I can only imagine the compounding factor of people feeling like they already know you. Switching gears, what types of books do you like to read? How do you find the time?

CC: My husband and I took the week off between Christmas and New Years to be with our kids and disconnect from the world. We realized we had these columns of magazines around the house: The Economist, The New Yorker, and National Geographic. I thought it was so strange, but then I realized it’s because we don’t go anywhere. We used to read these magazines on the subway, in a car, on an airplane. But we don’t do any of that right now. We got through just a tiny fraction of what we wanted to read over that week. But we also ended up thinking about how what we’ve read has changed so much over this past year. Thankfully, I don’t think that’s true with our kids. We have always read a lot with our kids. We have always had this sacred time of reading with our kids before bed.

My daughter has been obsessed with sharks for years, and we have read so much about them. My son Aidan loves numbers, math, and stories about mathematicians and the discovery of math. Much of our free time is reading time. Personally, and for pleasure, I love reading history. I also love detective books, especially in the last four years. I like books where the bad guy is caught and the mystery is solved and there are consequences for evil. I’ve always liked a good detective story, but I have read far more mysteries in the last four or five years, because of everything happening in the world, than I would’ve read otherwise. I also try to read my friends’ books. My friend Sarah Lewis, who’s a professor at Harvard, has a new book coming out on Carrie Mae Weems, the amazing American artist. That’s an important third category, too, not just supporting my friends, but wanting to know more about their work.

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