WASHINGTON, June 4: In a highly anticipated memoir due out next week, Senator Hillary Clinton confides that she was “dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged” when she learned of her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Recalling her emotions when president Bill Clinton confessed to her his “inappropriate intimate contact” with Ms Lewinsky, a White House intern, immediately before testifying before a grand jury on the matter in 1998, Hillary Clinton wrote: “I could hardly breathe.

“Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, ‘What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?’ I was furious and getting more so by the second. He just stood there saying over and over again, ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was trying to protect you and Chelsea,’” she said, according to excerpts published in US media outlets on Wednesday.

“Living History,” due in bookstores on Monday, has already hit number two on Amazon.com’s bestseller list.

Mrs Clinton, 55, wrote that until that confession, she believed the accusations were pure fabrication, aimed at attacking her husband politically.

After learning the truth, she said, she was “dumbfounded, heartbroken and outraged that I’d believed him at all”.

“As a wife, I wanted to wring Bill’s neck,” she noted.

“The most difficult decisions I have made in my life were to stay married to Bill,” she wrote, “and to run for the Senate from New York.”

During a family vacation at the time, she said, the family pet was the only one willing to spend time with the president.—AFP