Hillary Clinton’s relatability tour made a stop in middle school on Thursday. Marley Dias, the 11-year-old girl whose campaign to collect 1,000 books with black girl protagonists made national news, email-interviewed the candidate for Elle about friendships, self-esteem, and role models, giving Clinton the chance to share a few adorable tales from her childhood and coming of age.

“I am really proud of you,” Clinton writes to Dias, striking the easy air of an encouraging grandmother or grade-school teacher. “Keep striving for your goals, and remember that it’s good to be ambitious. There’s nothing wrong with knowing what you want and going after it. And Marley, what you’ve accomplished already is proof of that.”

Dias inquires about Clinton’s favorite “black girl book” (Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) and the three things she’d bring to a deserted island (chocolate, a book, and a phone with which to FaceTime her grandchildren), then asks if she had any insecurities in middle school before developing the confidence of a poised politician. “Oh, Marley, I have a terrible story to tell you,” Clinton writes. She continues with an embarrassing tidbit straight out of YM:

It was my first week of high school, and I was excited and nervous. At that time, I wore my hair in a ponytail or held back with a headband. When I saw the older girls with their hair in little bobs, I thought that looked so much more grown-up, so I begged my mother to take me to a real beauty parlor to get my hair cut. Our neighbor recommended a man who had a small shop behind a grocery store, and he got distracted talking to my mother and hacked off a huge chunk of my hair! I was mortified. So I tried to fix it by wearing a fake ponytail to school. And then a friend of mine accidentally pulled it off in front of everyone. Which of course was a nightmare. At the time, I felt like it might have been the worst moment of my life.

Here, Clinton sounds like a warm-hearted guidance counselor comforting a tearful preteen after a conspicuous fart in gym class—a perfect tenor for an interview in a kids’ zine with a candidate who’s battled the “likability” police. She wraps up the hair story on a doubly tender note and a reminder for older readers of the misogyny she’s absorbed throughout her decades in public life: “Now that I’m older, I have a little more perspective. But I certainly remember what it was like to be your age and be so worried about what people thought of me. And I’m glad I didn’t know back then that I had a whole life ahead of me of people commenting on my hair!”

This is the latest of several opportunities Clinton has taken to mold her message and personal story to outlets that lend themselves to intimacy. On Humans of New York, she recounted how she faced down sexist taunts during her law-school admissions exam, adopting HONY’s format of nameless, context-free anecdotes. She’s launched a behind-the-scenes podcast that consists of Elena Ferrante endorsements and casual, friendly chats with an interlocutor who calls her by her first name. In July, Chelsea Clinton shared a series of old family photos with Pop Sugar, allowing us to delight in the special moments in ‘80s and ‘90s fashions she and her mother shared.

Clinton’s conversation with Dias shines a similarly golden, familiar light on the candidate, whose answers and anecdotes are written in the kind of kindly and cozy tone one might use with a friend’s child. The campaign’s recent reminders that Clinton was a bright, vulnerable kid before she was a controversial public figure—such as this new-ish video starring Clinton’s childhood friend Betsy, which is embedded in the Dias interview—are well-executed efforts to show that, as Dias writes in her piece, “She’s a real person—just like I am, just like my mom is, just like you are. She’s not just a presidential nominee. She’s a friend. She’s human!” Our common essence of humanity, it seems, is teenage humiliation.