It’s hard to upstage a figure as sainted as Eleanor Roosevelt, but author Amy Bloom has found a voice if not as saintly then certainly as memorable: Eleanor’s onetime lover and lifelong friend, the tough-minded journalist Lorena Hickok. Their romantic relationship, actively erased by the press in their lifetime, remained in the shadows until Susan Quinn’s 2016 dual biography, Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady.
Historical fiction is a favorite of Bloom’s, as are explorations of sexuality and gender, and Hickok had the sort of picaresque life the author favors—like the 1920s adventuress fleeing the pogroms of Russia in 2007’s Away or the half-sisters of 2014’s Lucky Us, in search of fame and fortune in 1940s Hollywood. White Houses is historical in a different way; there’s a real timeline and reported facts. But Hickok’s life story has enough gaps that Bloom could play around. What’s undisputed is her desperate girlhood in South Dakota and a career as a reporter for the Associated Press. By 1932, Hickok was the most famous reporter in America.
Hick, as many called her, first interviewed Eleanor for the AP in 1928. In the next few years, their relationship deepened to the point that she could no longer objectively cover the Roosevelts. When FDR was inaugurated in 1933, Hick got a job investigating his New Deal initiative—and a bedroom adjoining the first lady’s in the White House.
Researching Lucky Us piqued Bloom’s interest in the Roosevelts. “If you’re looking in the ’30s and ’40s,” says Bloom, “you can’t escape them.” That took her to the Roosevelt library and Eleanor’s 18 boxes of correspondence with Hick—3,000 letters in all. “Somebody said to me, ‘Why did you write a novel as opposed to a history?’” says Bloom. “Because I’m a novelist not a historian! It’s like when people would say to Willie Sutton, ‘Why do you rob banks?’ It’s because that’s where the money is.”
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