Blooming love and imaginative account of the real-life affair with the US President’s wife

This is the story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Hick’s hidden love and secret affair.

Lorena Hickok, an accomplished ground-breaking  journalist, one of America’s first female sportswriters, a lead reporter for Associated Press and the first woman at the New York Times  to have front page byline, who covered everything from the Lindbergh kidnapping to the Wall Street Crash to Franklin D Roosevelt’s successful campaign  is understood to have been a passionate affair with the first lady of the US and resigned only when her love for the president’s wife compromised her impartiality.

She lived in the White House for several years and became widely known as “ First Friend”, and took a job investigating Depression-hit American for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Hickok originated from a poverty-stricken abusive, hardscrabble background in rural South Dakota.

With over 3, 500 letters written over the course of 30 years and held in the Franklin D Roosevelt archive, their relationship had a deep intimacy, and it supported Eleanor,  in becoming a writer and an outspoken civil rights campaigner, and after Roosevelt’s death a notable humanitarian.

Hick describes Eleanor “ the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips”.

The novel opens shortly after Roosevelt’s death in 1945 when, after a period of separation, Eleanor asks Hicks to come to her Washington Square apartment and over the course of weekend spent reading and responding to letters of condolence, and their affair is rekindled. The book paints a vivid picture of the life at the White House during the epoch-making years of FDR’s four terms in office, from 1933, until his death,  in detail letters and conversations between the two women.

The final section st in 1962, give us a snapshot of Hick grieving for Eleanor a few days after her death.

Hick briefly lives as a teenage runaway to Eleanor’s privileged and often as the corridors of power Bloom gives us conversation where little is said and everything is implied with a sense of eavesdropping on history.

“I felt my robe open and our tired white flesh  meets and what may not look beautiful does feel beautiful.” Bloom gives us the grace and dignity of imperfect love instead of titillation and managed to capture the public’s attention both in America and beyond with wise, deeply humane novels.

 

White Houses by ~Amy Bloom, Granta £12.99, 224 pages.