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On Thanksgiving Day in 1996, when Hillary Clinton was in the White House, she had a long conversation with her best friend, soulmate and confidante, Diane Blair. The two women had forged a relationship in the 1970s when they were both teaching in Fayetteville in Arkansas Bills home state and would remain close until Blairs death from cancer in 2000.

With the blunt honesty of a trusted friend, Blair raised with Clinton one of the most vexed problems that has bedevilled her years of public service: her toxic dealings with the press. Couldnt she avoid a lot of grief, Blair suggested, by developing friendlier relations even fake ones with media figures? And shouldnt she stop changing her hair so often?

Blair clearly touched a nerve, provoking a defiant riposte from the first lady. In todays context, at the end of a week in which Hillary Clinton has yet again found herself face-to-face with a sceptical press demanding answers about her use of a private email address while working as Americas top diplomat, her robust words almost two decades ago sound uncannily prescient.

Im a proud woman, Clinton began. Im not stupid; I know I should do more to suck up to the press. I know it confuses people when I change my hairdos. I know I have to compromise.

But then Clintons tone suddenly shifted. But Im just not going to, she said. Im a complex person and theyre just going to have to live with that. Im used to winning, and I intend to win on my own terms.

Win on my own terms the phrase would make a great title to a chronicle of the battles Clinton has fought under the public spotlight. It runs through her White House struggles to introduce healthcare reform and her war with what she famously dubbed the vast right-wing conspiracy. It was evident in her bruising clash with Barack Obama in her first unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2008. And judging from this weeks events at the UN, where she treated reporters asking about her use of a private email server while secretary of state with a dismissiveness that verged on contempt, it looks like its becoming a storyline in the 2016 presidential campaign that she is expected to launch within weeks.

Clintons attitude towards the press is not the only insight that can be gleaned from the friendships that she made during her early years in Arkansas. Through Diane Blairs confidences, contained in private papers that were recently opened at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, and interviews with several other close friends in Fayetteville and Little Rock, seeds of many of her later achievements and troubles, strengths and flaws, can be seen to have been planted in the rich soil of Arkansas.

Saint or sinner? Feminist pioneer or self-interested careerist? Which is Hillary Clinton? Diane Blair herself pondered deeply that question, asking herself in one of her private notes why her great friend was so polarizing, why to her Hillary Clinton was funny, wicked and wacky yet to others she came across as a malevolent, power-mad, self-aggrandizing shrew.

That unanswered question, so pertinent today, can to some extent be answered from Clintons Arkansas days. Some of her most controversial qualities her fierce guarding of her privacy, the belief in doing things her own way, her fraught relationship with money are all visible in nascent form during the period 1974 when she moved to Fayetteville and then Little Rock, to 1993 when she entered the White House. So too are positive attributes that in the cut-and-thrust of the news cycle rarely enjoy an airing, such as her passionate embrace of womens and childrens rights, and her undiminished and unbreakable loyalty to those she loves.

Hillary Rodham was 27 when she came to Fayetteville, a progressive college town tucked in the north-west corner of the state. Fateville, she called it, poking fun at the local southern drawl. It wasnt fate that drew her here, though, so much as the relentless charm offensive Bill Clinton waged to attract her here, drawing her away from a potentially stellar legal career on the east coast.

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Hillary Clinton: running to win - but on her own terms