Former President Bill Clinton and author James Patterson stopped by the Daily Show to discuss their latest novel, The First Gentleman.
Clinton and Patterson’s novel—their third collaboration—was published earlier this month by Little, Brown and Knopf. The thriller tells the story of an NFL tight end whose wife is elected U.S. president and who then goes on trial for the murder of his girlfriend 17 years earlier. A critic for Kirkus called the book “carefully constructed, entertaining escapism with a political edge, and just the thing for beach or airplane reading.”
Daily Show correspondent Jordan Klepper asked Clinton, “What’s it like to live inside the headspace of the first gentleman?”
“I don’t know, I tried,” Clinton replied, to laughter and applause from the audience. “Let me say, it’s not easy. Our guy…he’s a complicated figure. He’s not hung up about his wife being the president. He’s proud of her.”
“Would you have been as good as our guy?” Patterson asked. “I don’t know.”
“On that score, I would have,” Clinton said. “I thought Hillary was the best-qualified person in my life to be president.”
Klepper asked Patterson about the genesis of the book, saying, “Is it murder first? Is it story first? Is it plot first?”
“It’s always character first,” Patterson said. “But interestingly with this book, about halfway through, it wasn’t working. And this has never happened with us before. And [Clinton] called up and said, ‘I don’t like any of the characters.’ I said, ‘I agree, I don’t either.’ So we had to go back and work on the characters.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
