Hillary Clinton and Louise Penny Dish on the Bawdy Good Time They Had Writing New Thriller

You know how famous people collaborating on a project say they're friends, but you just know they're not the kind of friends who hang out for no reason or ever see each without makeup, wearing pajamas?

Put Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny, who teamed up to write the new political thriller State of Terror (on sale on Tuesday), down as the bare-faced, pajama kind of friends.

In their first joint chat about the book project — begun in 2019, more than two years after the former secretary of state and the Canadian master mystery writer were introduced by Clinton's lifelong best friend, Betsy Ebeling (who died of cancer in July 2019) and bonded themselves — Clinton and Penny told PEOPLE in this week's issue how they conjured a top U.S. diplomat (a Spanx-wearing blonde woman, naturally), gave her a best friend and counselor named Betsy and put them both into a could-happen thriller straight out of Clinton's own nightmares.

PEOPLE: Would it be impolitic to say that I liked your book even better than your husband's collab with James Patterson?

Clinton: You just caused me problems! [laughs] We wanted to write not the typical thriller with slam-bang action and bodies and very little character development.

Penny: We needed real, well-rounded people that the readers could identify with. Characters who are afraid, who feel insecure, who actually have human emotions.

PEOPLE: I recognized the Betsy character straightaway as an homage to your Betsy [Ebeling]. What do you think she would make of her character in the book?

Clinton: She'd be very excited and a little embarrassed and not at all interested in any spotlight. We created a fictional Betsy — clearly we were inspired by the friendship and the love and the extraordinary ability to bring people together to help solve problems that she had.

PEOPLE: What about the character's potty mouth?

Clinton: Not at all! No. No. That was totally made up.

Penny: In fact, Madame Secretary here made me take out most of the F-words in the manuscript. I said, "Oh, no, people talk like this." She says, "No they don't. I don't." [laughs] But some remain. Some survived.

PEOPLE: The fictional secretary of state, Ellen, and her top adviser Betsy trade little word play. Like, An oxymoron walks into a bar. Was that an inside joke you and Betsy Ebeling had?

Clinton: That was something Louise has been wanting to figure out a way to use for a long time. She loves mixed metaphors.

Penny: It reflects these two intelligent women who love the English language and use it with amusement, but also as a code.

PEOPLE: So Betsy introduced you two after 2016. I find it's hard to make new friends at this age. Especially with "famous" people who are naturally wary.

Penny: Hillary was very wary about me. [laughs]

Clinton: Yeah. It went both ways. [laughs] But that's a very good point and something that we reflected on because we wanted this book to be yes, a thriller. We wanted to drive action. There are a lot of bodies strewn about. But we really wanted it to be, number one, a book about friendship and about support and loyalty, and about characters who evolve. We wanted to enjoy knowing these people.

Penny: And they're a reflection of our own friendship — and women's friendship. Because so often, at least in the past — I think it's changing now, thank God — we women are depicted as not liking each other, not trusting each other. We wanted to put the lie to that. That simply hasn't been my experience and it hasn't been your experience, Hillary. Your closest friends are women. Mine are too. We wanted to reflect that. We couldn't have written this if we weren't friends.

PEOPLE: What clicked for the two of you, even before you started working on this book? Was it Betsy?

Clinton: It was Louise's work that Betsy and I first encountered that made us really interested in who this woman was who wrote these really wonderful mysteries set in this little village in Quebec. We read all of them, we read them together. Then when Betsy did an interview during the 2016 campaign, she was asked about being my friend for all these years, going back to 6th grade. She was asked specifically, 'What do you and Hillary do together?' One of the things that she said was, 'We like to read the same books and then talk about them.' When the article was published, one of the publicists who works for Louise's publisher pointed it out to Louise and said, "Oh, Hillary Clinton's best friend from childhood is a big fan of yours and says that they read your books together. She's from the Chicago area. You're doing a book tour that will take you near there. Do you want to meet her?" Luckily for all of us, Louise said, "Sure."

Penny: I did say sure, for sure. But as you know, when you're on a book tour and just before you're going on stage and you've got other things on your mind and you're tired because you've traveled and done interviews, the last thing you really want to do is meet people back stage.

Clinton: Oh, don't give away our secrets!

Penny: It changed my life. That moment, almost so much of what has happened in my life and many people in my life — Betsy was the taproot that led to this moment today. That was August 2016. My husband died two weeks after the end of that tour. Then Hillary lost the election. We still hadn't met. They we finally did meet in Chappaqua [New York]. Hillary invited Betsy and me for a weekend. Was it January? February?

Clinton: Early in 2017.

Penny: It's all a blur, isn't it? That's when Hillary and I just connected so deeply. It would've been easy not to and to continue to have Betsy as the intermediary. But I think we were just two wounded women who understood that deep wound, that deep hurt that we both had.

PEOPLE: What was it like working on this book? These types of projects can strain a relationship.

Clinton: That's what I worried about. When my agent called and said that my publisher Simon & Schuster had gotten this idea from somebody who used to be at Louise's publisher—that Louise and I should write a fiction book together and actually I think it was in part motivated by what Bill and James Patterson did together — I was very apprehensive. I thought, look, I've never written fiction before. Louise is a really good friend of mine now. I love and admire her. I don't want to do anything that would upset the friendship.

Penny: I said, "I have to think about it." It certainly wasn't an immediate yes. For all those reasons. And also because you and I are very similar. I think that's one of the things we understand about each other is that if we're going to do something, we want it to be exceptional. I wasn't sure I would be able to write an exceptional thriller. I had no doubt that you would bring a lot to the table, I just wasn't sure I could do my part. Yeah, there was a lot of fear. I think that's why we were also able to write the characters who have insecurities and uncertainties and some fear as well — because we do.

Clinton: Once Louise and I talked about it, we decided that it was a risk we were willing to take. At that point we didn't have a book that we were trying to sell. We didn't even really have an idea. We said, "Okay, let's work together and see if we could come up with a story that felt doable and within each of our areas of expertise and that would be a good collaboration." So we began in the summer of 2019 working on an outline. Throwing ideas back and forth. Coming up with different things we could write about. Finally at one point, which was really helpful, Louise said, "So as secretary of state, what kept you up at night?" I told her a couple things. One of them was the continuing threat of nuclear weapons, especially in the hands of terrorists and criminals and other terrible people. She really resonated to that. That's when we began to dig deep into, what would a story look like and who would it be?

Of course, I have to confess since my husband had written a book featuring a president, I thought, "Okay, I think a woman secretary of state sounds just perfect there." Then we really began to work on an outline, lay out the arc of the story, introduce the characters.

Penny: I think it was 19 pages. I thought we'd do three pages of something fairly skeletal about the plot.

Clinton: We did it over FaceTime. This was before the pandemic when we were doing the outline. Zoom was not even on our consciousness before the pandemic. It was 2019, late summer, fall. We finally said, "Okay we've got to let it go. We've got to show our agents and our publishers," and we did and they loved it! Some time in the fall of 2019, we made the agreement that we were going to write a book together. We were going to write a political thriller. Louise still had to finish the editing of her ongoing latest Gamache book. I was on a book tour with Chelsea as you might recall, because you interviewed me. So we were both finishing off 2019. We had lots and lots of stuff to do.

Then we really got serious about the process, starting shortly into 2020. We had all these plans about meeting at exotic resorts, and having spa weekends while we were writing our thriller together. None of which came true because the pandemic intervened. But you know what? It was a blessing. Because we were both stuck at home. If I had been on my regular kind of schedule, and Louise had been on her regular kind of schedule, flitting all over the world, having a grand old time. We probably couldn't have made the deadline.

Penny: We'd still be working on it! Oh my God, the FaceTime calls, I can't begin to tell you. We'd say, "Let's do a FaceTime call at 7 o'clock because we'll be fresh."

Clinton: And there she'd be on FaceTime in her moose-colored Canadian flannel pajamas. [laughter]

Penny: Pajamas! With moose! They come with Canadian citizenship. Because Hillary kept mocking me for these pajamas, I gave her what I thought was a pair of flannel moose pajamas.

Clinton: It turned out to be an apron — a moose-covered apron.

Penny: Who makes that mistake?!

Clinton: Apparently, Amazon.

Penny: I want to know, do you ever wear it? Do you even know where the kitchen is?

Clinton: I do know where the kitchen is, thank you very much. My house is not that big. Every time I come down in the morning, it's right there. The moose apron is getting some use.

PEOPLE: Just don't wear it as pajamas—

Clinton: [laughing] That would make quite a sight!

PEOPLE: What was the longest marathon FaceTime for you two?

Clinton: Maybe an hour and a half?

Penny: The problem is, as you can probably gather, we end up spending 45 minutes just yakking about whatever. In one of the early calls when we were working on the synopsis, I hadn't asked you yet what was your nightmare. So we were going around and around. We have a Secretary of State, now what? Well, suppose she falls into a mud pile? That's not going to propel 300 pages. Suppose this, suppose that. We got ourselves so confused at one stage that we literally both stopped talking and sort of stared at each other, expecting that the other would say something intelligent. That might have been the longest call.

PEOPLE: Let's talk about the book's insider details. First of all, I never knew that the secretary of state's place is called Air Force Three.

Clinton: Oh no, we just made that up. It's a nickname that people used, but it's nothing official.

PEOPLE: The scene of Ellen running disheveled to the State of the Union address (read an exclusive excerpt) gives me the perfect excuse to ask you something I've always wanted to ask you: Is it true that on the plane as secretary of state, you at least once pulled your hair back with a binder clip?

Clinton: Yes. That is true. It was actually more than once. But I don't believe I ever got off the plane with a binder clip in my hair. There may be a picture.

Penny: That would've been a fun scene in the book.

Clinton: The next book. Make a note.

Penny: This book has Hillary all the way through it. From Mahogany Row to the Five Eyes. It was just fascinating. What scared me was Hillary's answer to what was her worst nightmare. Then she would send me articles and tell me to read this book and that book, which I did. It became clear that, had we written this book five or six years ago, people would've laughed us off the stage. And now it's prescient. This is a work of fiction for sure, but gosh. I think a lot of people are going to recognize the real world in it, and yes, it's terrifying.

Clinton: The plot rests on some very bad decisions that were made by the prior president. We did have the benefit of observing our prior president over four years make some really bad decisions. The character is not Donald Trump. But the character shares attributes, as most fictional characters do, with someone who sadly for our country and the world proved to be really unreliable and quite cavalier about the dangers that we face. There were experiences and characteristics that we gleaned from a lot of different people, and used them to make the point that you can agree or disagree on somebody's politics, but the last thing we can afford is a president who makes decisions because he has some hidden agenda that has nothing to do with the best interests of the country.

PEOPLE: Ms. Penny, do you remember something Secretary Clinton suggested that you nixed?

Clinton: Oh, no, I'm the one who was nixing her.

Penny: To de-f--- the whole book! I can't tell you the number of great f---- I put in there. She took them out. [laughter] All of the insider information there, all of the twists, that all came from Hillary. My imagination isn't that good to come up with these things that actually could happen.

Clinton: And hopefully never will happen!

PEOPLE: You said there were three things that kept you up. Are the other two going to be books two and three?

Clinton: Stay tuned!

Penny: It'll be up to the readers of course. If people like [this book] as much as we hope they do, then we're one step closer to a sequel. We just have to recover from this one!