“I realize that one of the pleasures of being human is gossip and judging. Although the book makes it clear Eleanor and Hickok are lovers, Bloom is discreet when the characters enter the bedroom.

Hickok gave up her reporting after falling in love with the first lady because she knew she could no longer be an objective observer of the president and his wife.

The book flashes back to Hickok’s troubled childhood, her roundabout journey to a career as a reporter and then an assignment to write about Eleanor that turns into a friendship that expands into love. The book opens after Franklin’s death with Eleanor and Hickok in New York City wondering what the future will hold. One of the wonderful aspects of the novel is that it will work as a love story even for young readers who might not be as steeped in Roosevelt history. The research for “White Houses” was fascinating, Bloom says, and allowed her to create “acts of imagination” in her storytelling. Even when they lost each other (as lovers), they were still friends.” “Reading the letters, you can see it was such a big relationship. “In this case, there was a lot of fact to work with - 3,000 letters,” the novelist says. While Bloom uses the freedom of a novel to create her own vision of Eleanor and Hickok’s affair, it is all grounded in research. The writer found herself growing annoyed by historians who portrayed Eleanor as some sort of political nun in a cloister: “I would read things like ‘She never had a sexual wish in her life.’ Oh, my God.”

But I don’t think anyone is just one thing.” Eleanor always seems saintly (in most historical accounts). She had set her book “Lucky Us” in the 1930s and early 1940s, and while doing research, “I kept encountering the Roosevelts everywhere I would go. (All I was trying to do was) create a story a reader enters into until they close the book.”īloom began thinking about the novel after she enjoyed a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. Most of the novels in the world are set in a previous time. “I was just writing a novel with some real people in it. “I have to say that it didn’t occur to me that I was writing historical fiction,” she says. The author says she wasn’t thinking about the biographical fiction genre when she became fascinated by Roosevelt and her connection to Hickok. Since both women were rather matronly in appearance, and lived in a time when women were thought to be much less sexual than men, only Washington insiders suspected the relationship was more than a close friendship. “White Houses” is a love story about a closeted gay relationship between one of the most famous women in the world and her unlikely lover.

The poppy war book 3