In this dream, the war would end and Franklin would retire. Hick and her Eleanor dream of the day when they can retreat to their own little white house. She put out her filthy hand for the dime and walked up to the next corner, making sure I wasn’t following and cutting into business.
I said, It was all right, I’d give her the dime if she went home. Bloom corrects that historical oversight with her fictional Hick.Ī girl, skinny and still flat-chested, saw my fedora and my coat and smelled my cigarettes. Hickok’s reports reach the President and First Lady but not the general public. She’s hired by Harry Hopkins to report on the devastation of the Great Depression and the first attempts at recovery known as the New Deal. The real Lorena Hickock moves into the White House. Amy Bloom, White Houses (Granta Publications 2017) Two Houses Eleanor’s body is the landscape of my true home. Here are the woods, here is the smooth path to the only door I wish to walk through. Here are the plains, the fine dry slopes. The hills, the valleys, the narrow ledges, the riverbanks, the sudden eruptions of soft or crinkling hair. She gives voice to all the passion her fictional Hick can summon.Įvery woman’s body is an intimate landscape. Hickok didn’t think that Eleanor had been discreet enough or that America was ready to hear what a pair of little old ladies might get up to. Hickok had willed the letters to the FDR Library under the condition that they remain sealed for 10 years after Hickok’s death.īut first, Hickok burned most of Eleanor’s letters written in the early days of their romance. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Bloom found 18 boxes of letters between the First Lady and her First Friend, 3000 in all. That novel was set in 1940s US, an era defined by the Roosevelts.
High Noonīloom stumbled across the story of Eleanor and Hickok while researching her novel Lucky Us. Franklin Delano Roosevelt: we think he might make it to the White House. Her editor sent Hickok to interview the wife of a presidential candidate.
She had just covered the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and needed to cool down. They met in their 40s while Hickok was a reporter for Associated Press. White Houses is a fictional account of the love affair between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok. How lovely, then, to discover that Amy Bloom has written a novel that stars not one but two little old ladies. In fact, since I started in 2017 to review books, I haven’t read a single one.
I can’t remember the last time I read a novel starring a middle-aged woman.
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