People who know Clinton often complain that the press, and therefore the public, never gets to see how warm and funny she is in person. “Chasing Hillary” is the best explanation so far of why that is. Chozick describes Clinton’s press shop (which she calls “The Guys”) as an anonymous gang of manipulative, unresponsive and vaguely menacing apparatchiks who alternate between denying her interview requests (47 in total, by her count), bullying her in retaliation for perceived negative coverage (“You’ve got a target on your back,” one of them tells her) and exploiting her insecurities about keeping up with her (often male) colleagues. The campaign quarantined the press on a separate bus and, later, a separate plane, often without even an accompanying flack to answer basic questions. It denied Chozick’s interview requests even for positive stories, like a piece about Clinton’s experience in the early 1970s going undercover to expose school segregation in the South, and refused to confirm the most minor details, like whether Clinton ate a chicken wing or not.

It seems clear from Chozick’s account that Clinton thought of her traveling press corps as more buzzard than human (although she did write Chozick a note when her grandmother died). Bill Clinton also had troubles with the press, but at least he would say hello at events or tell a long-winded story. Even Trump, who spent the campaign railing against the “fake news” media, seemed to intuit that a cordial relationship with reporters was essential to managing his public image. Trump once called Chozick out of the blue to provide a comment for an article, and they ended up chatting about “The Apprentice.” So grateful to be actually speaking to a candidate (in nearly 10 years, Clinton had never called her), Chozick made the mistake of telling him that Clinton hadn’t had a news conference in months. Shortly afterward, the Trump campaign began blasting that Clinton was “hiding” from the press.

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In fact, Chozick spoke with Clinton so infrequently that their entire personal relationship can be summed up in a half-dozen interactions that are shockingly banal: the time Clinton said “hi” to her in Iowa, one 14-minute phone interview, the time Clinton accidentally walked in on her in the bathroom. The fact that Chozick interacted so rarely with Clinton over nearly 10 years of covering her for The Wall Street Journal and then The New York Times is perhaps the most damning evidence of Clinton’s self-destructive relationship with the press. “How could we communicate Hillary’s ‘funny, wicked and wacky’ side to voters,” she asks, “if we never saw it for ourselves?”

Chozick’s own funny, wicked and wacky side is on full display, with well-drawn sketches of everyone from fresh-faced campaign interns to the candidates themselves. With her lively voice and eye for detail, “Chasing Hillary” is an enjoyable read, like “The Devil Wears Prada” meets “The Boys on the Bus.” Watching Clinton during a town hall gathering was like “catching up with an old girlfriend who cites G.D.P. statistics over brunch”; going to meet Bernie Sanders felt like “when my mom made me visit her emphysemic Aunt Shirley.” Her recollections of her adolescence in Texas and early jobs in journalism are just as spirited: After she told her fourth-grade class that she supported a Democratic candidate, “I might as well have pulled on a skullcap and recited my haftorah.”