In Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton talks about climbing onto a wooden motorboat bobbing on Geneva Lake in Wisconsin early one September morning.
 
“We were all a little wobbly,” she admits. Some of the wobbles came from gobs of celebrating the day and night before over Labor Day weekend. But other wobbles came from being no longer so very young — becoming women who “can see the perimeters coming in closer and closer,” wrote Clinton, to borrow a phrase from poet Maya Angelou.
 
Secretary Clinton’s mission that September morning was to view a property on Williams Bay where a childhood friend was building something. “Our friend was making her dream come true,” wrote Hillary, “and we were there to cheer her on.” Life had taught Clinton the value of having “sister friends” above and beyond all the seemingly warm relationships one makes in politics. This was one of those special friendships.
 
The project that morning was the Women’s Leadership Center at Williams Bay, and the friend making her “passion project” come true was Ann Drake.
 
Something Lost, Something Gained is a meditation on the glory and the grind of living in the public eye for decades. Hillary Clinton rose from First Lady of Arkansas to First Lady of the United States to Secretary of State to senator from New York to the first woman to win a presidential nomination by a major U.S. political party. Along the way she received many lessons in friendship. Some included discovering the profound value of “sister friends,” or women who “know your spirit …. They see the real you and they love you anyway,” she writes.
 
Among them was this “tall, smart girl with brown hair,” writes Clinton. “I was seven years old when I first met Ann in our shared hometown of Park Ridge, Illinois. She went to a different elementary school but connected with me in ballet class …. and in Sunday school and confirmation classes.”
 
They also bonded as teens through trips to summer church camp on the shores of Geneva Lake. “Ann and I are mission-driven kindred spirits,” writes Clinton, in part a product of their time at church camp, influenced by a charismatic pastor-teacher. As Drake and Clinton skimmed across Geneva Lake on that September morning, those memories came flooding back.
 
What time taught her, wrote Clinton, is that “we are never alone.” The friends who stood by her in good times and after deep disappointments became “my blanket, my sword and my shield.” These aren’t the friends of a season or a campaign but of years spent seeing each other through everything life brings. Clinton begins and ends her chapter on the value of such connections with words from a song written more than a century ago:
 
Make new friends, but keep the old
One is silver and the other’s gold.
A circle’s round; it has no end.
That’s how long I want to be your friend.

 
“This is the story of my sister friends,” she writes. “I cannot fit in these pages all the stories of all the women dear to me.”