— NBC News (@NBCNews) August 23, 2017
"This is not OK, I thought," the former secretary of state detailed in an excerpt obtained by MSNBC's Morning Joe Wednesday. "It was the second presidential debate, and Donald Trump was looming behind me. Two days before, the world heard him brag about groping women. Now we're on a small stage and no matter where I walked, he followed me closely, staring at me, making faces. It was incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck."
"My skin crawled," Clinton noted.
The candidate wondered whether she should've carried on or gone ahead and turned around to tell Trump, "back up, you creep." Ultimately, Clinton decided to keep calm, albeit acknowledging that telling him off "certainly would have been better TV."
"What would you do?" Clinton wrote. "I chose option A. I kept my cool, aided by a lifetime of dealing with difficult men trying to throw me off. I did, however, grip the microphone extra hard."
Clinton, however, wasn't the only one that noticed the tense atmosphere during the second presidential debate in St.Louis, Missouri. In fact, some spectators likened the encounter to a horror movie.
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) October 10, 2016
"Everyday I was a candidate for president, I knew millions of people were counting on me. And I couldn't bear the idea of letting them down," she wrote. "But I did. I couldn't get the job done. And I'll have to live with that for the rest of my life."
Expected to hit shelves September 12, Clinton's latest memoir is also expected to cover the role of former FBI Director James Comey in the bumpy 2016 presidential election.
Simon & Schuster, the book's publisher, deems "What Happened" Clinton's "most personal memoir yet."
"In the past, for reason I try to explain, I've often felt I had to be careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I'm letting my guard down."