Gasps of delight rose from the crowd at the Javits Center on Thursday night when it was announced that Cheryl Strayed, author of the best-selling memoir Wild, would be interviewing Hillary Clinton, the star guest at this year’s Book Expo America. Clinton was there to talk about two forthcoming books—a children’s adaptation of 1996’s It Takes a Village and what appears to be a campaign memoir—and she could not have asked for a friendlier audience or interlocutor. (Strayed appeared at a fundraiser with Clinton in 2016.) It was a soft landing for what had been a high-wire week for Clinton, in which she re-entered the spotlight only to find herself caught between two competing impulses: the desire to move forward and the need to look back.

Her dilemma was epitomized by the venue itself. The Javits Center, encased in panels of glass, was where the Clinton campaign held what was supposed to be its victory party on Election Night, a hulking metaphor for the historic glass ceiling she was about to shatter. It turned into the scene from a nightmare, with supporters breaking down in bewildered tears as the unthinkable happened. Clinton never made it to Javits that night, but she seemed unfazed by her presence at the site of so much trauma, which dovetailed with a theme she has returned to time and again since stepping back into political life: resilience. In fact, the talk was being held in the spacious basement of the Javits Center, a metaphor so depressing, or perhaps so obvious, that no one mentioned it.

“I really have this determination, as somebody said about me the other day, a stubbornness,” Clinton told Strayed. “You just get up and do the best you can. It’s literally one foot in front of the other. When you’re fighting for something larger than yourself that keeps you going when you’re down and out personally.” This is precisely the kind of sentiment that Clinton’s many supporters can get behind. It would appear to be her most broadly endearing quality, for Clinton’s popularity tends to rise when she is, as she put it, down and out. But for her detractors, it is evidence of a less attractive trait: an inability to see her own flaws and mistakes clearly.

In fact, the talk was being held in the spacious basement of the Javits Center, a metaphor so depressing, or perhaps so obvious, that no one mentioned it.

This is, of course, a debate liberals have had hundreds of times before. It blazed back to life last Friday, when New York magazine published a sympathetic profile of Clinton’s post-election life, provocatively titled, “She’s okay. How about you?” Clinton opened up about the frustrations and indignities she experienced on the campaign trail, and suggested she was ready to reenter public life as a card-carrying member of the resistance. It was a moving and compelling portrait of a woman coming to terms with a harrowing and bizarre election, one that turned out to be a catastrophe for the country, for women’s rights, and for Clinton herself.

It also stirred the hornets’ nest that appears to follow Clinton wherever she goes. Was Clinton the victim of sexism? Or was Clinton cynically using claims of sexism as a cudgel to silence her critics? Did Clinton take sufficient responsibility for losing to the least popular candidate in recent memory? Or did she pass the buck, blaming a constellation of factors that included the Russians, former FBI Director James Comey, and the mainstream media?