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In a Memoir, the Impeachment Witness Fiona Hill Recounts Her Journey From ‘Blighted World’ to White House

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By Jennifer Szalai

• Oct. 1, 2021

The arresting title of Fiona Hill’s new book, “There Is Nothing for You Here,” is what her father told her when she was growing up in Bishop Auckland, a decaying coal-mining town in North East England. He loved her, and so he insisted that she had to leave.

Hill took his advice to heart — studying Russian and history at St. Andrews in Scotland, sojourning in Moscow, getting a Ph.D. at Harvard and eventually serving in the administrations of three American presidents, most recently as President Trump’s top adviser on Russia and Europe. “I take great pride in the fact that I’m a nonpartisan foreign policy expert,” she said before the House in November 2019, when she delivered her plain-spoken testimony at the hearings for the (first) impeachment of President Trump. But for her, “nonpartisan” doesn’t mean she’s in thrall to bloodless, anodyne ideas totally disconnected from her personal experience. She wrote this book because she was “acutely aware,” she says, “of how my own early life laid the path for everything I did subsequently.”

Sure enough, “There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century” weaves together these two selves, slipping back and forth between the unsentimental memoir reflected in its melancholy title and the wonkish guide promised in its inspirational subtitle. The combination, however unlikely, mostly works — though by the end, the litany of policy prescriptions comes to sound a bit too much like a paper issued by the Brookings Institution, where Hill is currently a fellow. When recounting her life, Hill is a lucid writer, delivering her reminiscences in a vivid and wry style. As much as I wanted more of Hill the memoirist and less of Hill the expert, I began to sense that giving voice to both was the only way she could feel comfortable writing a book about herself.

Looked at from afar, Hill’s story seems like a triumphant tale of striving and accomplishment. Born in 1965, she grew up in a “blighted world.” Her father followed the men in his family into the mines when he was 14; as the industry started to collapse in the 1960s, he found a job as a hospital porter. Hill’s mother worked as a midwife. As late as the 1970s, Hill’s grandparents lived in a subsidized rowhouse without “mod cons,” or modern conveniences, including indoor plumbing. Her grandfather had been pierced by the “windy pick” — the pneumatic drill — and had to wear a brace around his pelvis “to keep his battered insides in” for the rest of his life.

Hill recounts all of this with immediacy, tenderness and a good bit of gallows humor. She recalls how the people of Bishop Auckland started calling the crumbling town “Bish Vegas” — finding scraps of comedy in their depleted circumstances was how they reconciled a degraded present with a once-bustling past. She describes working a string of part-time jobs to help her family, including one at a medieval banquet hall, where she had to wear a ruffled costume that kept falling down her skinny frame. Her mother crafted a bosom for her from pantyhose stuffed with tissue — “this worked well enough,” Hill writes, until she slipped on a patch of “wayward mashed potato” and fell to the floor, thereby “dislodging the boobs.”

Costumes are a recurring motif in the book, as are self-deprecating glances at previous humiliations. Growing up, Hill wanted her clothes to disguise her family’s financial need, but they were more likely to give it away. Her mother sewed her a pair of trousers from heavy fabric left over after making window treatments — earning Hill the school nickname of “Curtain Legs.” Hill interviewed for a university spot wearing a homemade skirt with a heraldic pattern and a cardigan that was “nice,” she writes, “if you were 80.” Later, she had the resources to fashion the kind of self-presentation she wanted. She recalls being in a shop in 2019 with her mother, who yelled out: “Hey, Fiona, there are some suits on sale over here — might you need one for that impeachment thingy you’re doing?”

As for that “impeachment thingy,” Hill doesn’t say much about the actual hearings, though she has plenty to say about Trump. Instead of making the usual insider-memoir move of fixating on all the brazenly outrageous behavior — the bizarre comments, the outlandish tweets — Hill notices his insecurities, the soft spots that, she says, made him “exquisitely vulnerable” to manipulation. Yes, she writes, the Kremlin meddled in the 2016 election — but unlike the #Resistance crowd, which insists that such meddling was decisive, Hill is more circumspect, pointing out that Vladimir Putin wasn’t the force that tore the country apart; he was simply exploiting fissures that were already there .

Just as concerning to her was the way that people around Trump would wreak havoc on one another by playing to his “fragile ego” — spreading rumors that their rivals in the administration had said something negative about Trump was often enough to land those rivals on what the president called his “nasty list.” Hill says that watching Trump fulminate made her feel like Alice in Wonderland watching the Queen of Hearts, with her constant shouts of “Off with their heads!” In Hill’s telling, Trump’s norm-breaking was so flagrant and incessant that she compares him, in her matter-of-fact way, to a flasher. “Trump revealed himself,” she writes, “and people just got used to it.”

But neither Trump nor Putin — who was the subject of one of Hill’s previous books — is what she really wants to talk about. What she sees happening in the United States worries her. Economic collapse, structural racism, unrelieved suffering: Even without Trump, she says, none of the country’s enormous problems will go away without enormous efforts to address them. Hill the expert points to heartening examples of benevolent capitalism at work. But Hill the memoirist knows in her bones that the neoliberal approach, left to its own devices, simply won’t do.

The 1980s were a pivotal decade — for Hill, and for the world she knew. Her own career was on the rise, but the people around her were losing hope. “Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of 20th-century industry,” she writes, combining her memories and expertise, “while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off.”

Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai .

There Is Nothing for You Here Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century By Fiona Hill 422 pages. Mariner Books/HarperCollins Publishers. $30.

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There Is Nothing for You Here by Fiona Hill review – more than a White House memoir

Trump’s former Russia adviser charts her journey from County Durham to DC, showing how populism thrives when communities are abandoned

W hen Donald Trump heard Fiona Hill was publishing a memoir, he characteristically tried to land a pre-emptive blow, dismissing his former Russia adviser as “a deep state stiff with a nice accent”. As Trumpian insults go, it was enough of a backhanded compliment for one of Hill’s friends to have it printed on a T-shirt as a gift.

A lot has happened since Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings in late 2019 in which Hill gave evidence, not least a frontal assault on US democracy by his supporters. But people still remember her accent. There was something so calm and matter-of-fact in Hill’s flat County Durham vowels that was the antithesis of Trump’s bullying bravado. Her voice, that of a coalminer’s daughter from northern England describing the turmoil and corruption inside the White House, instantly raised the question: “How did she get there?”

Hill’s book, There Is Nothing for You Here, is a long, thoughtful answer to that question. It takes in the story of industrial and political rot in three nations: the UK, the country of her birth; the US, the country of her choosing; and Russia, the object of her lifelong vocation.

The powerful currents driving the modern history of those three states carried her on her remarkable life’s journey. The state-assisted euthanasia of the British coal industry in the early 80s drove her from her home town of Bishop Auckland, where her family had been miners for generations.

The book’s title was a warning from her father, Alf, to get out while she could. He had first gone down the pit at the age of 14, but by the time Fiona was growing up, the only job he could find was as a hospital porter, the bottom of the heap with no way up. The Hill family were the archetypal victims of the post-industrial decline she would go on to study. “We were living data points,” she realised.

Following her dad’s advice she worked her way out through study. She went to St Andrews University and then to the Soviet Union in time to observe its last climactic years. The expertise she gained took her to the US and Harvard as a Russia scholar with a growing reputation that ultimately brought her to the White House.

Trump took his pre-publication shot at Hill because he naturally assumed her book, like a shelf-full of others by former staffers, would be all about him. But for Hill, the ex-president is just the symptom of a deeper, chronic dysfunction.There is plenty here about the craziness of life in the Trump administration and Hill has a knack for capturing the absurdities of the court of King Donald. She describes the scramble to get his attention (he had no idea who she was and on one occasion mistook her for a secretary), the relentless bullying (she was called the “Russia bitch” by her “colleagues”), and the universal fear the president would turn against them.

While other Trump-era memoirs have focused almost solely on the carnival, Hill’s scope pans out to the wounded country that put him in office, and then wider still, across the Atlantic to Britain and then across Europe to Russia.

What they all had in common is rapid, catastrophic deindustrialisation. In Russia, that came about through the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union. In the US and the UK, it was inflicted by the political leadership and their economist gurus.

“Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of twentieth-century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off,” Hill notes. Those buried alive, in that memorable metaphor, lost their sense of community and self. Being a miner was more than a job to Alf Hill and his contemporaries, it was an identity.

That is where political populism comes in, offering to fill the hole with comforting illusions. Hill points out that 61% of voters in Bishop Auckland chose Brexit even though it meant cutting off EU structural funds vital to its attempts at regeneration. It is also why American rust belt voters convinced themselves that Trump understood them.

It is an analysis that has been laid out by others before, but what makes it particularly compelling here is that it is intertwined with a unique life story of a working-class English woman who ended up sitting across from, and cooly observing, the preening “strongmen” of our age.

Where Hill is most provocative is in her warnings that having centuries of democratic experience will not necessarily protect us from Russia’s fate. “Russia is America’s Ghost of Christmas Future”, she argues, a harbinger of things to come if we can’t adjust and heal our political polarisation.” What if the next Trump is “less personally insecure and more capable”? And what if the next insurrectionary mob that invades the US Capitol is better prepared, Hill asks in this fascinating book. The answer? “They might just manage to hold it.”

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clock This article was published more than  2 years ago

The rare Trump insider memoir that doesn’t obsess over Trump

In 'There Is Nothing for You Here" Fiona Hill warns of the dangers to democracy and opportunity in America and beyond

THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU HERE: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century

By Fiona Hill. Mariner Books. 422 pp. $30.

Early in her 2019 testimony during the congressional impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, Fiona Hill spoke of her upbringing. The former White House adviser grew up in a coal-mining community in northeast England, she explained, and later endured discrimination because of her working-class accent. After studying history and Russian at St. Andrews in Scotland and visiting Moscow on an academic exchange in the late 1980s, Hill pursued graduate studies at Harvard University, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen and a national security expert serving multiple administrations. “I am an American by choice,” she told the House Intelligence Committee, emphasizing that “this country has offered me opportunities I never would have had in England.”

It was the kind of inspiring preamble easily forgotten amid Hill’s testimony on Russia’s election interference and the “political errand” that Trump loyalists were conducting with Ukraine. Hill, who previously co-authored an incisive biography of Vladimir Putin, has now written a memoir — one that, in the tradition of former White House officials, gives her a chance to reveal more of the mayhem of the Trump years.

Fortunately, that is not the book this former official chose to write.

As it turns out, we should have paid more attention to Hill’s life story. Though her book does feature first-person accounts of Trump and his inner circle, “There Is Nothing for You Here” is a more ambitious and personal effort. The preamble has become the point. Hill links her experiences in England, Russia and the United States to argue that the countries suffer a similar malady: a steady postindustrial decline that stokes cultural despair and leads to a polarized politics in which populists thrive. “From the late 1980s to the 2020s, in the heartlands of both Russia and the United States, I saw grim reflections of the decline of my hometown,” she writes. “As the sense of hopelessness spreads, so does the anger — and the potential for people’s fears and frustrations to explode into the political arena.”

The argument is not entirely novel — we’ve heard about the plight of the Trump voter — but Hill’s insights on three societies show how economic and political struggles threaten to render the American experiment unexceptional. “Democracy is not self-repairing,” Hill warns, and though she worries about the gap between the haves and the have-nots, she recognizes how the pain of the used-to-haves can pose risks to democratic survival.

Hill witnessed those frustrations in her community of Bishop Auckland, in England’s County Durham. This book is dedicated to her parents, and Hill recalls her father’s despondency when he lost his mining job and had to take lower-paying work as a hospital porter. No matter the decades he spent in the new job, “he was once and for all a miner,” Hill writes. “It was his basic identity.” It was not just jobs that disappeared but the social connections making up the life of a community, too — all the clubs, sports teams and holiday celebrations that surround a workplace. “It was the same in the U.S., the UK, and the USSR,” Hill writes. “When the mine or the factory closed, there was no work, nothing to do, and nowhere to go.”

Her father urged her to seek opportunity elsewhere. “There’s nothing for you here, pet,” he said, both advice and warning. The northeast of England had become “an opportunity desert,” Hill concluded. She left.

In this telling, the economic reforms of the Thatcher era in Britain, the Reagan years in the United States and the post-Soviet “shock therapy” in Russia are a single story. In all three places, the “infrastructure of opportunity disappeared,” Hill writes. The timelines were different, but the reduced employment, higher education costs and devastating substance abuse were eerily similar. Early in her years in the United States, Hill realized that chunks of the country needed an economic revival just as much as the former Eastern Bloc. “The idea that the West had won the Cold War and capitalism had prevailed over communism deflected attention from the troubles of America’s old manufacturing centers,” Hill writes. “But at the end of the 1980s, the Rust Belt was far more like the Soviet Union and the North East of England than most Americans realized.”

Hill served as a senior intelligence officer on Russia during the George W. Bush and Obama administrations and as senior director for Russia and Europe on Trump’s National Security Council staff; she understands Putin’s efforts to undermine America’s democracy and global standing. Even so, she regards Russian interference in the 2016 election as a distraction in understanding America’s turmoil. “The voters who had swung the ballot for Donald Trump in critical counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were swayed by consideration of their own personal, family, and communal circumstances, not by the fake internet personas devised by Russian intelligence services,” she asserts.

Books on the Trump-Russia scandals obsess over the news. What they need is more history.

Those socioeconomic conditions, and their political consequences, are the key Russia connection, Hill argues. “Populism had short-circuited Russian representational democracy, and now it was coming for the UK and the U.S. too.” Hill views Trump and Britain’s Brexiteers as Putin-like populists, offering divisive slogans rather than practical policies. And instead of interpreting Trump’s debacle at the 2018 Helsinki summit — when the president endorsed Putin’s denials of election meddling rather than the findings of the U.S. intelligence services — as evidence of nefarious dealings, Hill sees it as another example of Trump’s “autocrat envy.” Trump admired Putin’s management of Russia, Hill explains, and he regarded foreign leaders as more trustworthy than lowly U.S. administration experts. The result was the embarrassing presidential “word fog” of the kind Americans witnessed throughout Trump’s time in office.

The author’s encounters with Trump exemplify his style and character, especially his casual sexism. When Hill was introduced to the president as his new Russia expert, Trump responded with an icy “Rex is doing Russia,” referring to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. In a meeting when Hill paused after the president mistook her for a secretary, he followed up with a demeaning “Hey, darlin’, are you listening?” A female senior official later advised Hill to never wear that same outfit to a meeting with Trump, because he “always noticed what women were wearing.” And Hill even learned that some White House colleagues — if one can call them that — disparaged her as the “Russia bitch.”

Review of "I'll Take Your Questions Now" by former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham

Overall, however, Hill’s insights into the Trump White House — he was obsessed with his television coverage, he ran the place like a family business — reaffirm more than they reveal. Hill herself had no illusions about him. Shortly before her formal National Security Council interview, she participated in the 2017 Women’s March. “I went from being a woman marching around the perimeter of the White House one day to going in through the visitor’s gate to the West Wing the next,” she recalls. Yet she is never entirely clear about why she went to work for an administration she had openly protested. Perhaps completing the journey “from the coal house to the White House,” as she puts it, was tempting — the culmination of her career, or a way to prove she had overcome the discrimination of her childhood.

As a White House adviser, Hill worried about Trump’s substantive ignorance. “The problem is the president doesn’t know any of this,” White House Chief of Staff John Kelly whispered to her at a Group of 20 summit in Buenos Aires, when they both realized that the president was out of his depth. “He doesn’t know any history at all.” She was also disturbed by his authoritarian impulses, even musing that Trump wanted to transform the office into an “elected monarchy.” But her main concern was that the disaffection, and decay behind Trump’s rise would worsen and further enable extremist politics, a trend that could “make the traumas of the four years from 2016 to 2020 seem like a preface, rather than a postscript, to the United States’ democratic demise.”

Ever the wonk, Hill suggests national programs, private-sector efforts and philanthropic initiatives to strengthen school systems, bridge digital divides, remove racial barriers and reduce the male-female wage gap. (She is painfully knowledgeable on this last point, having endured pay disparities in academia, foundations, think tanks and government service.) It is all solid, reasonable stuff — a longtime Brookings Institution researcher, Hill cannot resist citing its studies — but she lapses into her own sloganeering. “Rather than building back better,” she urges, “America would have to build forward together.”(Italics by author, groan by reviewer.) Bold steps are needed, political will is missing, and even a “Marshall Plan for Middle America” makes an appearance.

If not groundbreaking in her prescriptions, Hill is still perceptive in her diagnoses. “There should be no such thing as the wrong place to live,” she concludes near the end of the book. Such simple passages, grounded in experience, prove memorable. It’s the kind of insight occasionally gleaned from congressional testimony, if we listen carefully enough.

Carlos Lozada is the Post’s nonfiction book critic and the author of “What Were We Thinking: A Brief Intellectual History of the Trump Era.” Follow him on Twitter and read his latest book reviews , including:

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2021

New York Times Bestseller

THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU HERE

Finding opportunity in the twenty-first century.

by Fiona Hill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 2021

A shrewd, absorbing memoir that casts a sharp eye on America's future while offering feasible solutions for change.

A renowned expert on modern Russia recounts her struggles overcoming economic and social barriers growing up in northern England and draws attention to the looming issues of inequality she sees in the U.S.

Hill had been a foreign affairs adviser for many years before serving as an official for the U.S. National Security Council under Donald Trump, yet it was through her engagingly blunt witness testimony during Trump’s first impeachment trial that she gained national attention. Her personal story, in particular, attracted the public’s interest and curiosity. In this ambitious, immensely compelling memoir, Hill interweaves her interesting life story with events and issues she has continued to observe during her career. “My life experiences, long before I ended up in the Trump White House, had opened my eyes to the dangerous consequences of economic disruption and social dislocation,” she writes. “In the United Kingdom, my family experienced the overwhelming sense of economic precariousness and political disenfranchisement that also beset millions of people in the U.S. over the generations stretching from the 1960s to 2020.” The author persuasively argues that America may be heading in a similar direction to Russia unless we address the crucial challenges facing much of the country, specifically regarding education, health care, and job opportunities. Drawing insightful parallels between Trump and Putin, she unpacks how the threat of populism can quickly undermine democracy: “If we fail to fix our ailing society by addressing them and providing opportunity for all, another American president, just like Vladimir Putin, might decide to stay in power indefinitely.” Currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Hill also recounts her personal challenges as a woman working in the highest levels of government, struggles that all women readers will recognize, regardless of their workplace.

Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-358-57431-6

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Mariner Books

Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | WOMEN & FEMINISM | POLITICS | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Award Finalist

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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BOOK REVIEW

by David Grann

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BOOK TO SCREEN

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

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There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

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An urgent warning that America is on the brink of a socioeconomic collapse and authoritarian swing that could rival modern Russia’s—from the celebrated foreign policy expert who served as a key witness in the first impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.

Growing up in England’s coal-mining country, Fiona Hill knew that she was in a forgotten place. The last of the local mines had closed, businesses were shuttering, and despair was etched in the faces around her. Her father told her to get out—to go to London, or Europe, or America. “There is nothing for you here, pet,” he said.

Hill managed to go further than her father ever could have dreamed. She studied in Moscow and at Harvard, became an American citizen, and served on the National Security Council. But in the heartlands of both Russia and the US, she saw grim reflections of her hometown and similar populist impulses. By the time she offered her brave testimony in the impeachment inquiry of President Trump, Hill knew that the desperation of forgotten people was driving American politics over the brink—and that we were running out of time to save ourselves from systemic collapse. In this powerful, deeply personal account, she shares what she has learned, and explains that only by expanding opportunity can we save our democracy.

Additional information about the book can be found here .

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Professor John Tomaney

July 6th, 2022, book review: there is nothing for you here: finding opportunity in the twenty-first century by fiona hill.

2 comments | 10 shares

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

In There is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century , former National Security Council official  Fiona Hill describes the journey that took her from County Durham to Washington, DC. Showing deep empathy towards those in ‘left-behind’ places and linking this predicament to shifts in geopolitics, this is a perceptive, lucid and frequently witty read, recommends John Tomaney . 

If you are interested in this book review, you can listen to a podcast   of Fiona Hill speaking as part of the LSE Festival 2022 event, ‘Russia, America, and the Future of European Security’ , recorded on 15 June 2022. 

There is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century . Fiona Hill. Mariner. 2021.

In There is Nothing for You Here , Fiona Hill describes the journey that took her from County Durham to the imperium of Washington, DC. At its heart, the book concerns the fate of what have become known as ‘left-behind places’ – communities which have become economically, socially, culturally and politically uncoupled from broader prosperity and which have responded, in her view, to the siren call of populism. Her hypothesis is that ‘There are political costs when places are effectively written off and their most basic needs are neglected’ (181). The title of the book, ‘ There is Nothing for You Here ’, derives from her father’s injunction, which propelled the teenage Hill out of her hometown in the 1980s.

There is now a growing body of academic research about ‘left-behind places’ and a nascent literary genre. The latter often rests on the trope of a person who has departed their small town for the bright lights of the big city and makes a ‘very personal return journey’ to investigate the plight of those left behind. In the US, it is perhaps exemplified by JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy , an excoriation of a white working-class culture in Appalachia, to which Trumpism spoke. In the UK, in a similar vein, a small explosion of books, of variable quality, addresses the fate of forgotten towns . Gabrielle Chan’s insightful account of the decline of small-town Australia offers another perspective. Beyond the Anglophone world, Édouard Louis’s autobiographical novel, The End of Eddy , recounts his brutal upbringing in impoverished Hallencourt in Picardy, France; elsewhere, he reports why his working-class father votes for Marine Le Pen .

What distinguishes Hill’s contribution is the deep empathy she displays toward people in ‘left-behind places’ that allows her to show what people feel they have lost; and her ability to link their predicament to shifts in geopolitics, rather than to seek explanations rooted solely in the character of the places themselves or in simple claims about the outcome of market forces. About this, Hill writes perceptively and lucidly, and the text is enlivened by always effective, and often funny, anecdotes.

Image Credit: Crop of ‘Fiona_Hill_0605’ by LSE in Pictures . All rights reserved.

The first part of the book describes growing up in County Durham. Hill convincingly evokes the remarkable world of Durham coal-mining villages, of which she caught the tail-end in the 1970s and 1980s. (Full disclosure: I too was born and brought up in County Durham around the same time as Hill and, indeed, was acquainted with some of the characters and shared some of the experiences mentioned in the text.) Of course, these were poor places for much of their history but, as Hill astutely observes, they were marked by civic pride, a strong sense of belonging and intense traditions of collective self-help . Following nationalisation of the mines and the expansion of the welfare state after 1945, these communities experienced full employment and rising living standards: ‘In the 1950s, the Durham miners thought they had made it’ (25).

But, as Hill reached adulthood, this world was disappearing fast. Her father began his working life as a miner but when his colliery closed, he had to find employment as a porter at a local hospital where he met Hill’s mother, a midwife. (Alf Hill, though, continued to identify himself as a Durham miner. He lost not just a job but an identity.) Marked out early on as a ‘clever lass’ (54), Fiona was able in the 1980s to take advantage of what was left of the ‘infrastructure of opportunity’ (46) bequeathed by the welfare state and the collective institutions of the region. Her local Labour MP gave her early encouragement and, at a key moment, her Dad’s old trade union, the once mighty Durham Miners’ Association , gave her a grant to take a language course in pursuit of her ambitions to go to university. She writes: ‘I was a product of the “Labour Party at work”’ (102).

Coming of age at the end of the Cold War, Hill was determined to study Russian. Her journey into higher education was marked by microaggressions directed at her class origins and regional accent. (Accent, she notes, is a key battlefield of the class war in the UK.) There is an excruciating account of her failed entrance interview to Oxford University that ends in humiliation. Gaining entry to the University of St Andrews, she spent a year studying in Moscow. Here things took off. By a series of what Hill describes as accidents – but more likely resulting from her force of personality – she ended up studying at Harvard, eventually gaining a PhD.

The second part of the book tells of Hill’s career as an academic, think tanker and government official in the US, deploying her expertise on Russia, which also involved extended periods working there. The US was a liberation because the class discrimination she experienced in the UK did not seem to travel across the Atlantic. In the US, though, gender discrimination appeared more apparent in the professional worlds she inhabited. Hill states that, despite the everyday sexism she encountered in her youth, her gender was not a barrier to her educational ambitions in the UK. It was class that mattered.

Hill’s visits to Russia coincided with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the resulting ‘ market shock ’ therapy and the collapse of communities based on traditional industries. While Moscow eventually boomed, small Russian towns were marked by rampant alcoholism, declining life expectancy, drastic depopulation and the abandonment of the elderly. Such places became engulfed in ‘cultural despair’, fuelled by ‘a sense of loss, grievance and anxiety’ (156). These conditions, Hill notes, provided fertile ground for the populism of Vladimir Putin who promised to restore Russian pride. She draws parallels with County Durham and, later, with the rise of Trump in the US.

The third part of the book details Hill’s experience once she was appointed to the US National Security Council. She attributes Trump’s election to his appeal to people who had lost their identities and cultural moorings as well as their jobs. Hill acknowledges that Russia interfered in the presidential election but stresses that domestic factors were more important in determining its outcome.

Her job gave her a ringside seat at the West Wing. She describes the undisguised and pervasive misogyny of Trump’s White House, where her role and expertise were consistently belittled. She confirms the President’s unbridled narcissism and gigantic but brittle ego and how this translated into policy and diplomatic choices that destabilised world politics. Trump, she writes, suffered from ‘autocrat envy’ (226), coveting the strongman status of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and China’s Xi Jinping, and was especially envious of Putin and his vast ill-gotten wealth. But although presenting himself as an ordinary American against the ‘elites’, while holding the public in contempt, Trump was less adept than Putin at fomenting and exploiting social and political divisions to maintain power. In office, Trump was lazy, never read his briefs and could not stick to his own policy plans. His administration was characterised by incessant pettiness, chaos, vindictiveness and infighting, all of apiece with Trump’s worldview, leaving national security exposed and his manifesto unfulfilled.

A subplot of the story concerns the failure of the traditional parties of the working class. On visits to her relatives in County Durham, Hill is told ‘the Labour Party had abandoned the working class’ (179). This phenomenon was echoed in the US. She attributes this to the ‘lack of a direct relationship between ordinary people and prominent intellectual elites’ (154). For Hill, Hilary Clinton personifies this problem. During the 2016 presidential election, Clinton notoriously – and probably disastrously – referred to many Trump supporters as a ‘ basket of deplorables ’. In 2022, Clinton had ‘ lunch with the FT’ at the Michelin-starred Blue Duck Tavern at the 5* Park Hyatt in Washington DC’s swanky West End district. Over her $44 Chesapeake Bay Jumbo lump crab cake, Clinton puzzled over why people are so nostalgic about mining communities: ‘Whether they were from West Virginia or Tyneside, their lives were so grim and disease-prone and unhygienic — but the nostalgia for those days. I don’t know.’ There is Nothing for You Here furnishes us with insights that might ease Clinton’s puzzlement. Hilary should have met Alf Hill.

In the final part of the book, Hill outlines an alternative policy prescription. This focuses especially on the power of education and makes many good arguments but also contains a contradiction. The importance of place as the main locus of politics is the key theme of the book, but the policy prescriptions are generic. We lose sight of place. For instance, for the US, Hill proposes a new federal agency for rural development. But this feels like a Beltway solution – what evidence is there that the Feds know what to do about rural America? Meanwhile, her own brilliantly told story shows that County Durham thrived when it had the power collectively to help itself.

Note: This review gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science. The LSE RB blog may receive a small commission if you choose to make a purchase through the above Amazon affiliate link. This is entirely independent of the coverage of the book on LSE Review of Books.

About the author

John Tomaney is Professor of Urban and Regional Planning in the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London.

Very much looking forward to the ‘in discussion with’ ! Have told all my marras about it!

Tyne Tees did a story on Ashington (a few miles north) where I and my family are from, a few years back. In talking to the local school kids, none had a hope for the future in the town. Around that time, when we visited the house my great-grandparents had lived in, the 80-year old lady living there was going to join her family in Australia, where they had gone to find work. I luckily left earlier than Dr. Hill, and was able to find success in the States as a Mining Engineer, but there were not that many of us. I found her perception on what communities must do that have been built around mining, but seen it die, to be enlightening, and given that there are many similar regions in this country, would wish that more folk read that part of the book.

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Former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill warns the U.S. is on a path to autocracy

Terry Gross

Fiona Hill, the National Security Council's former senior director for Europe and Russia, arrives on Capitol Hill on Nov. 21, 2019. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images hide caption

Fiona Hill, the National Security Council's former senior director for Europe and Russia, arrives on Capitol Hill on Nov. 21, 2019.

Russia expert Fiona Hill warns that American democracy is under attack — from within.

In November 2019, Hill became one of the key witnesses at then-President Donald Trump's first impeachment hearing , where she condemned the false narrative that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election, and described the Trump administration's parallel policy channel in Ukraine to get dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden.

Hill worked in the Trump White House as the top Russia expert. She watched Russian President Vladimir Putin manipulate Trump, she says, and observed as Trump increasingly resembled the authoritarian leaders he admired, including Putin.

"Trump himself was a massive counterintelligence risk, because of his vulnerabilities and the fragility of his ego," Hill says.

After her testimony at the impeachment hearing, Hill received death threats. "I stopped answering my telephone, switched off the answering machine, got some security cameras," she says. "I was advised to seal up the mail slot on my door to make sure nobody put a pipe bomb or a packet of powder through it."

Book Reviews

Fiona hill explores why it's tough to get ahead in 'there is nothing for you here'.

Hill grew up in the coal country of northeast England, the daughter of a miner. By the time she graduated from high school in 1984, the mines had closed down. At her father's urging, she moved to the U.S. in 1989. She became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Hill's new memoir, There Is Nothing for You Here , takes its title from the words her father used when he encouraged her to leave England. In her time in the U.S., Hill says she has seen the country take progressively "darker turns," including the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

"The United States is teetering on the edge of violence here. We're already, I think, in a cold civil war," she says. "We've got a chance now to turn this around. But if we don't take it, we're heading down that autocratic path that we've seen in other countries."

Interview highlights

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century , by Fiona Hill Mariner Books hide caption

On her decision to work in the Trump administration

The irony is that just before I'd been offered the job, I'd taken part in the Women's March . ... I'd gone around the White House in the protest march and then found myself called in to ask if I would take the position, and I resolved to do it because it was obvious that we were acutely vulnerable. ... I was, of course, I think, in retrospect, somewhat naive about how much one could actually get done in that domestic context. I kind of thought that more people would be fully appreciative of the national security crisis that we had on hand and realize that for, sadly, a rather lot of people around Trump and for Trump himself, this was all just a big political game and one for personal benefit.

On how in her second meeting with him, President Trump called her "darlin' " and assumed she was a secretary

In the moment, I wish I would have been able to say, "Sorry, sir, Mr. President, are you speaking to me? I'm Fiona Hill, the senior director for Russia and Europe." I actually kind of have to say that I hoped that one of the guys in the room sitting much closer would have actually said, "Mr. President, this is your Russia adviser." But of course, by this point, it was all too late and nobody helped me out. Nobody said who I was. ... Leaping up and looking like deer in the headlights was probably not the best professional move I've ever made, but in the moment, I was just somewhat startled. After that, I made sure that that wasn't going to be the case again. Let's just say I was not prepared well for that moment. I also have to say that I do think that the other men in the room were quite startled by it and also didn't know how to react.

On the scrutiny she faced about her appearance in the testimony

Investigations

Trump's former russia adviser testifies as part of impeachment inquiry.

Immediately, the team of lawyers said, "Well, we'll need to have someone to do your hair and your makeup, and we'll need to kind of figure out how you look on the day." And I felt, "Really? Do they do this for men as well?" I mean, it immediately brought back decades of memories as a professional person going all the way back actually to school and my childhood about the fixation that people have about how you dress and how you look. ... I always thought when I was younger, like "God, I'm not going to be 14 forever, and eventually this won't matter." And you get to be 54 and it still matters, particularly if you're a woman.

On how Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a strident Trump supporter, came to her testimony uninvited and stared at her to try to intimidate

It was clear that it was intended to be witness intimidation. It was kind of like a middle-school or even grade-school staring contest. And I'm quite a bit older than him. And let's just say I went to a pretty rough school. I can hold my own. And he was also basically making it very clear that I was nothing. He was kind of looking me up and down ... like, "Oh, this middle-aged woman here, who does she think she is?" And after doing the staring contest for a period of time, and I didn't drop my gaze, he then proceeded to pick up a couple of newspapers and peruse [them to signal] that I was nothing, that I shouldn't be paid attention to. So it was quite obvious, it was glaringly obvious what he was up to. It also made it seem like a game, which I, of course, didn't consider it to be. ...

It helped make it clear that this was going to be the tone, in part, for these hearings. That again, this was a political circus where I thought it was deadly serious and was trying to get across the fact that this was an issue of national security. We couldn't have the privatization of national security. Our democracy was under assault from the outside — but now, clearly, from the inside and, in many respects, he prepared me for what was going to happen next.

Heidi Saman and Joel Wolfram produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.

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Gideon Rachman

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Many people who tried to work for Donald Trump were either discarded or bitterly disillusioned.

Few have given more eloquent testimony of what it felt like to work closely with the former US president than Fiona Hill, who served as senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council in the Trump White House from 2017 to 2019. Her memoir is a valuable and riveting historic document. She left the Trump administration in no doubt that her erstwhile boss was an American dictator in the making. 

Throughout the Trump presidency there was much speculation about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and whether the Russians “had something” on the US president. Hill favours a simpler explanation. Trump, she writes, suffered from “autocrat envy”. He was “fixated on authoritarians in general, not Putin in particular.” 

According to Hill, Trump saw strongman leaders like Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Xi Jinping of China as an exclusive club. “People like Putin, who was simultaneously an autocrat and reputedly super-rich, were an elite of their own. This was the group Trump wanted to see himself in — the internationally very rich, very powerful and very famous.” This was not a mere matter of strongman chic. Trump “wanted to govern like them. He wanted raw power”.

Hill shot to prominence after testifying in the Trump impeachment hearings of October and November 2019. Her testimony revealed a compelling combination of integrity, intelligence and dry humour. For viewers in Britain, there was an added intriguing detail. Hill speaks with a distinctive north-eastern accent. Who was this daughter of County Durham who had somehow made it to the inner sanctum of the White House?

This was the group Trump wanted to see himself in — the internationally very rich, very powerful and very famous

There Is Nothing for You Here answers that question. It is a memoir that mixes the personal and the political — telling her story along with that of the Trump years and US-Russian relations. In other circumstances this might have been an awkward combination. But Hill’s personal, professional and political lives form a coherent whole so that each part illuminates the other.

She is the child of a coal miner, who “having lost his job . . . lost his sense of self-esteem, belonging and wellbeing.” Hill’s origins mean that she intuitively understands the discontents caused by deindustrialisation in Britain, the US and Russia. She believes that the core support for Putin, Trump and Brexit came from similar constituencies, with similar grievances — “older, more male, less educated than others.” 

For the British reader, Hill’s memoir makes for sobering, sometimes shaming, reading. Without self-pity, she makes it very clear that her background imposed huge disadvantages on her. As a child she was offered a scholarship to a private school but was unable to take it up because her family could not afford the school uniform or the books. At an Oxford admissions interview and then, on occasions, as a student at St Andrews university, she was treated with hostility and contempt by some of the other students — although it is a crumb of comfort that the actual faculty seem to have been helpful and considerate. 

It was not until Hill got to the US, courtesy of a graduate scholarship to Harvard, that her talents were fully recognised and her distinctive accent was no longer a hindrance. After a doctorate in history, she built a reputation as a leading expert on Russia in academia and Washington think-tanks. Hill’s experience in the US turned her into an American patriot. But she does not default to the American slogan that her life story proves that, if you follow your dreams, you can be “whatever you want to be”. There is a touch of English realism and self-deprecation in her verdict that her success was actually a “fluke”. The last part of her book is a passionate argument for the removal of the structural disadvantages that hold back the poor in Britain and the US.

When I finished There Is Nothing for You Here , I was left with one remaining mystery. Why did she do it? Many of Hill’s friends in Washington would have warned her against working for Trump. Was it naïveté, ambition, a sense of duty or, despite everything, a certain ideological affinity with Trump?

On this, Hill is frustratingly taciturn. She clearly got on well with her direct bosses at the White House, John Bolton and HR McMaster, who headed the NSC. But she was originally recruited to the NSC when it was run by Michael Flynn, a former general and Trump loyalist, who was swiftly forced out of office and has now become a rabid conspiracy theorist. Hill notes the part that Flynn played in her recruitment but makes no further comment. Was there truly nothing about him that set off alarm bells?

Whatever her reasons for working in the Trump White House, I am grateful she did. The result is a memoir that will give pleasure to readers today — and will be an important document for historians of the future.

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century by Fiona Hill, Mariner $30, 432 pages

Gideon Rachman is the FT’s chief foreign affairs columnist

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Book Review: There is Nothing for You Here, by Fiona Hill

Culture Shock!

Fiona Hill burst onto the national, and international, stage when she testified in the 2019 impeachment hearings for President Donald J. Trump.

At the time, British commentators were struck by the woman with a distinctive working-class Northern accent who was an advisor to a US President and senior member of the American foreign policy establishment. The Financial Times referred to her as the “improbable” Fiona Hill. The sting in the tail of her testimony was, for the British establishment, her comment that she felt her background impeded her in the UK in the way it did not in the USA. They wondered how on earth she’d made it from an obscure northern hometown (Bishop Auckland, County Durham) to work in the White House, or, as she puts it in her new book There is Nothing For You Here , “from the coal house to the White House.”

The book is part autobiography, part indictment of the failings of the Trump administration. It embodies the lyrics of the Beatles song, Honey Pie:

She was a working girl North of England way Now she’s hit the big time In the U.S.A.

A coal miner’s daughter

Hill was, literally, a coal miner’s daughter. Born in 1965, her childhood was marred by the decline of the mining industry in the north-east of England. Her father was laid off from the mines and scraped by as a hospital porter. Her lived experience in the region stayed with her as she passed the 11+ exam, survived the challenges of a comprehensive school, made it to St. Andrews University, a scholarship to Harvard, and a stellar career as a fluent Russian-speaking expert the geopolitics of the 21st century and Vladimir Putin .

The book resonated for me because it has echoes of my own path from the north-west of England and the declining industrial town of Crewe to the States. I bailed out of an academic career, but the coincidences, fortuitous meetings, significant mentors, and sheer improbability of life in the USA that Hill notes were also my experience. That, and a shared distaste for what America has become under Trump, were themes in the book that grabbed me.

Populism at home and abroad

Throughout the book, Hill notes how the three countries she has lived and traveled in have embraced populism. The declining industrial areas of the UK are mirrored in the “Rust Belt” regions of the USA and magnified by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Time and again, in ways large and small, she notes how the rise of an authoritarian like Putin is predicated on the same populism exploited by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign in the UK, and, inevitably, the 45th President of the US.

Her academic background and serious foreign policy chops give rise to analysis and insights that distill the confusion surrounding Trump, Brexit, and Russian influence into clearly understandable themes. When political elites ignore the dispossessed, strongmen take center stage. Here’s one of many passages in the book–worth quoting at length–where Hill analyzes this:

Those who were attracted to the Tea Party and other populist movements were reacting to, and hoping to counter and even reverse, the effects of economic crises and demographic changes. The populists’ supporters were also reacting to and seeking a salve for the intense emotions that these changes and challenges elicited. Major societal changes, especially when they happen rapidly and in combination, help fuel what celebrated scholars of the twentieth century like Fritz Stern called “cultural despair.” Cultural despair is the sense of loss, grievance, and anxiety that occurs when people feel dislocated from their communities and broader society as everything and everyone shifts around them. Especially when the sense of identity that develops from working in a particular job or industry, like my father’s image of himself as a coal miner, also recedes or is abruptly removed, people lose their grip on the familiar. They can easily fall prey to those who promise to put things–including jobs, people, or even entire counties–back in “their rightful place.”

Hence, Hill demonstrates, Brexit, Putin, Trump. The clear and present danger she identifies is the continuation of populism and the emergence of a leader as competent as Putin on the American scene.

In the aftermath of Trump’s disastrous reign, it was tempting to breath a sign of relief. But that would have been premature, because there was no indication that his dynasty would fade away. And American populism looked like it was here to stay–unless we could find a way to mend our social and political divisions.

The “Russia bitch”

The experience of this multi-lingual academic expert in the Trump White House is no surprise, but nevertheless shocking. It follows challenges she’d experienced being mistaken for a high-end prostitute by hotel doormen when attending senior-level meetings in Moscow, discovering her salary as a woman was significantly lower than less qualified male counterparts in academia, and–early in her university days–being dismissed as a ‘common northerner’ by hoity-toity classmates. In the White House Trump’s first words to her were to yell “Hey, darlin’, are you listening?” when he mistook her as the only woman in an Oval Office meeting for a secretary. Later, she heard, staffers and first family members dismissed her as “the Russia bitch.”

She dishes the dirt on how Trump’s view of the world was that of a New York construction boss used to bullying suppliers, his lack of interest in briefing documents, and fragile ego easily exploitable by savvy foreign powers. Her account adds more damning evidence to the likes of Woodward and Costa’s Peril and Leonning and Rucker’s I Alone Can Fix It .

Hill mounts an appeal to expand the opportunities that gave her a ticket out of County Durham, and me a ticket out of Crewe: education as, in the words of the books’ subtitle a way of ‘Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century.’

Absent this, she concludes

These left-behind people deserve better. but their problems are everyone’s. They are our fellow Americans and fellow Brits, in some cases our family members and friends. Helping them will not be purely a selfless act. Because as long as they feel that there is no hope for them, there will be no hope for the rest of us. There will be nothing for us, anywhere.

posted by Theboss on 10.16.21 @ 11:05 am | 1 Comment

1 Comment so far Leave a comment

Wonderful review! I was wondering why I should read this book, and this review reveals the roots of populism from a personal perspective as well as its dangers. Thanks for posting.

By Brady Bevis on 10.20.21 1:24 pm

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May 6 – May 10, 2024

• In praise of the student journalists covering university protests
• Adania Shibli on book bans and the destruction of Palestinian literature
• “Every love poem is a Palestine poem, and every Palestine poem is a love poem.” Mandy Shunnarah on Mahmoud Darwish and writing Palestinian poetry .