a little help from a friend

Anna Wintour Helped Edit Huma Abedin’s Candid Memoir

Abedin wrote her book at Wintour’s Long Island home.

After years of standing silently behind her ex-husband, disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner (and her old boss, Hillary Clinton), Huma Abedin has released her side of the story, via a new memoir titled Both/And. But the 45 year-old, who was the vice chair for Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential run, had some help from an “unofficial,” but extremely influential, editor—Anna Wintour.

As Abedin told WWD during her book’s launch party at designer Tanya Taylor’s SoHo apartment, “[Wintour] was the very, very first person to see the pages because I wrote most of the book at her house [in Mastic, Long Island]. I would literally print the pages and she saw them in very, very raw form. She gave me the big picture, but very clear, concise feedback. I thought it actually helped with the quality of the book—suggestions on what was missing, how to end it.”

WWD added that Wintour “first suggested” the idea of Abedin writing a book at all, an idea that came to the Vogue editor-in-chief “in the weeks after the 2016 presidential election.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first excerpt of Both/And, which details how Abedin learned of Weiner’s first sex scandal in 2011, was published in Vogue’s November issue.