Eleanor baffled them, Bloom says: 'How could she be that virtuous? How could she be that hard-working? How could she be that devoted to people when she wasn't running for office and there wasn't anything to be gained?' As her fictional Hick puts it: 'Eleanor was a Great Lady and what man in Christ's name wanted to be married to that?' It was an open secret at the White House that Eleanor and Lorena were more than friends, but the men of the press were more interested in Franklin's mistress, the 'delightful, competent, charming, discreet' Missy LeHand. 'It hurt me, I tell you, to understand that the Hickoks of Bowdle, South Dakota, with shoes from a dead girl to wear on school days only and oatmeal for dinner, were lucky people.'

'Farmers watched their babies get through flu, survive mumps and measles, and then die of just plain starvation,' writes Bloom, as Hick.

She took a room at the White House and a job at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, reporting on the ravages of the Depression. She met Eleanor while covering FDR's presidential run in 1932, and was soon faced with the choice between resigning and betraying her soul mate. Most clearly I remember your eyes with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips.'īloom's novel, White Houses, is told in the first person by Hick: a remarkable self-made woman, born to an abusive father and sickly mother in dirt-poor South Dakota, with enough wit and gumption to become a staff reporter at the Associated Press – the first woman to get a front page byline in The New York Times. 'I've been trying today to bring back your face … Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. 'Only eight more days,' Lorena wrote on December 5, 1933. In another letter, she expresses frustration that she couldn't say ' je t'aime et je t'adore' on the phone, because her son Jimmy would have overheard, 'but always remember I am saying it and that I go to sleep thinking of you and repeating our little saying.' 'Oh! I want to put my arms around you, I ache to hold you close,' Eleanor wrote on March 7, 1933.

Hick burned a packet of Eleanor's letters from the most intense period of their relationship, and many of her own letters were burned by protectors of the Roosevelts, but the surviving 3000 leave little doubt they were lovers. And I thought 'I would really like to tell this love story'.' 'I thought 'what would it be like, to have been torn out of your own family album? What would it be like to be living at the time your relationship is being erased?' I could hear her.

Amy bloom eleanor roosevelt