Then I went and read the letters, and then I thought, “This is this extraordinary love story, lost to history.” And not only lost to history, but in fact, torn out of history. Blanche Wiesen Cook’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt talks about her relationship, writes about her relationship, with Lorena Hickok and that caught my attention. The letters were the communication between the two central figures, and so those were enormously illuminating and interesting, and passionate, and heartbreaking, all those things, as you hope they will be.Ī: Where did you get the idea for writing the book?ĪB: For my last novel, I researched the ’30s and ’40s, and you can’t really research the 1930s and ’40s in the United States without coming across the Roosevelts all the time, because they were fascinating and complicating people.
And then, to read the 3,000 letters between Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, which are at the Roosevelt Library, which represents a portion of their correspondence over 30 years.Ī: How informative did you find each of these sources? Did you draw most of your material from the letters, or was it in combination with the books?ĪB: The biographies were certainly very instructive, and useful for information and timelines and various correspondences, but the letters were the thing itself. The Argus: This book is based off of this fairly well-documented relationship between Lorena Hickok, the journalist, and Eleanor Roosevelt.Īmy Bloom: I think it probably depends on who you ask, but yes.Ī: So what was the process of researching for this book?ĪB: The process of researching the book was to read pretty much-not every, because it’s a pretty big category-but most of the biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt, of Franklin, of Lorena. The Argus spoke with Bloom about the process of writing her book, future book readings, and new literature she’s looking forward to reading.
13, charts a love story between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and the journalist Lorena “Hick” Hickok, whose real-life relationship is documented through the thousands of passionate letters they exchanged, even while Roosevelt was living in the White House. Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing Amy Bloom, who is a New York Times best-selling author and National Book Award nominee, has written a new novel entitled “White Houses.” The book, which came out on Feb.
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