The first two chapters of “What Happened” are wry and dramatic. Clinton recounts the otherworldliness of Inauguration Day — she briefly imagined herself in Bali — and the bleak weeks following the election, when she watched bad television, got in touch with her inner Marie Kondo and did lots of yoga. “If you’ve never done alternate nostril breathing,” she writes, “it’s worth a try.” An admirer sent her a note instructing her to watch “Gilmore Girls.” An old pal sent her mildly vulgar doggerel. “Friends,” she writes, “advised me on the power of Xanax and raved about their amazing therapists.” She declined both the drug and their referrals.

Image Credit... James Nieves/The New York Times

The best, most poignant parts of “What Happened” reveal the Hillary Clinton that her inner circle has assured us was lurking beneath the surface all along: A woman who’s arch but sensitive. She writes that she’s astonished whenever someone else is astonished to discover she’s human. “For the record,” she writes, “it hurts to be torn apart.” It stung when schoolmates in junior high teased her about “the lack of ankles on my sturdy legs.” It stung when they teased her about her glasses, too. She doesn’t even bother describing her reaction to the ticker of contumely that’s whirred above her head for most of her adult life, though she does write about how “incredibly uncomfortable” it was to be stalked on stage by Trump during the second presidential debate.

Far more controversial and complicated, surely, is the rest of “What Happened,” starting with Clinton’s arguments about the role of misogyny and sexism in the election. It’s hard to buy the idea that she suffered disproportionately from charges of untrustworthiness or inauthenticity simply because she was a woman. Her husband was considered so eely that the tabloids christened him “Slick Willy,” and plenty of male presidential candidates (Mitt Romney, John Kerry) were regarded as catastrophically insincere.

More persuasive is Clinton’s contention that presidential politics, especially compared to parliamentary politics, favors arena-filling showmanship rather than the quieter, detail-oriented realism she prefers. (How many times has Clinton been praised for being “a workhorse, not a show horse”?) And 2016 was nothing if not the year of the blusterer. One of the things that drove Clinton bonkers about Bernie Sanders was that he always managed to outdo her proposals with something larger and less feasible. “That left me to play the unenviable role,” she writes, “of spoilsport schoolmarm.”

You may have heard that “What Happened” is angry. It’s true. Or defiant, anyway. Love it or loathe it, chafe at it or cheer it; you will now see, for the first time, what it looks like when Clinton doesn’t spend all of her energy suppressing her irritation. Former FBI director Comey gets it on the chin; so does the mainstream media, this newspaper very much included. She’s got a special rucksack of descriptors for Trump (“hateful,” “a fraud”), whom she says is pulverizing democratic norms into a paste. “He doesn’t just like Putin,” she writes. “He seems to want to be like Putin, a white authoritarian leader who could put down dissenters, repress minorities, disenfranchise voters, weaken the press, and amass untold billions for himself. He dreams of Moscow on the Potomac.”

Her digs at Trump are not surprising. But her dig at Joe Biden is. Over lunch in 2014, Clinton explains, Barack Obama made it clear that he believed she was the Democrats’ best hope to keep the White House. “I knew President Obama thought the world of his vice president,” she writes, “so his vote of confidence meant a great deal to me.”