Choice quotes have been seeping out for weeks, and I’ll admit that I reacted to one of them — “Now I’m letting down my guard” — as if the smoke alarm had started shrieking in my living room. Why believe her? In her previous books, she measured her words with teaspoons and then sprayed them with disinfectant. Then again, we’ve been told over and over that Clinton is very different in private. And she is now a private citizen.This distinction seems to have made all the difference. “What Happened” is not one book, but many. It is a candid and blackly funny account of her mood in the direct aftermath of losing to Donald Trump. It is a post-mortem, in which she is both coroner and corpse. It is a feminist manifesto. It is a score-settling jubilee. It is a rant against James Comey, Bernie Sanders, the media, James Comey, Vladimir Putin and James Comey. It is a primer on Russian spying. It is a thumping of Trump. (“I sometimes wonder: If you add together his time spent on golf, Twitter and cable news,” she writes, “what’s left?”) It is worth reading. Winning the popular vote by nearly 3 million may not have been enough to shatter the country’s highest, hardest glass ceiling. But it seems to have put 2,864,974 extra cracks in Clinton’s reserve. In the run-up to the publication of this book, Democrats have been privately expressing their dread, fearing it will be a distraction and reopen old wounds. I wonder if, after reading it, they will feel otherwise. Are there moments when “What Happened” is wearying, canned and disingenuous, spinning events like a top? Yes. Does it offer any new hypotheses about what doomed Clinton’s campaign? No. It merely synthesizes old ones; Clinton’s diagnostics are the least interesting part of the book. Is there a full chapter devoted to her email, clearly intended to make her own closing arguments in this case? Yes. She can’t shake her inner litigator. But this book is not just a perseverative recap of 2016. It is the story of what it was like to run for president of the United States as the female nominee of a major party, a first in U.S. history. The apotheosis of Leaning In. Doesn’t this experience rate an account from Clinton herself? Especially when, after sticking her neck out, the only place some people could envision it was in a stockade? The best, most poignant parts of “What Happened” reveal the Hillary Clinton that her inner circle has assured us was lurking beneath the surface all along: A woman who’s arch but sensitive. She writes that she’s astonished whenever someone else is astonished to discover she’s human. “For the record,” she writes, “it hurts to be torn apart.” It stung when schoolmates in junior high teased her about “the lack of ankles on my sturdy legs.” It stung when they teased her about her glasses, too. She doesn’t even bother describing her reaction to the ticker of contumely that’s whirred above her head for most of her adult life, though she does write about how “incredibly uncomfortable” it was to be stalked on stage by Trump during the second presidential debate.