She put out her filthy hand for the dime and walked up to the next corner, making sure I wasn’t following and cutting into business.” I said, It was all right, I’d give her a dime if she went home. “A girl, skinny and still flat-chested, saw my fedora and my coat and smelled my cigarette. But the richest writing comes as Hickok describes traveling for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. “White Houses” gently relishes the carnal, recounting Hick and Eleanor’s hungering attraction. A closeted gay man with a successful role in the State Department, he’s vulnerable to political strong-arming. More intriguingly, she devises a cousin for Eleanor: Parker Fiske. Once a practicing psychotherapist, Bloom uses “freaks” and a rape to fill out the psychological biography of her lesbian protagonist, an unsubtle move. God’s conspicuous errors,” Maryann of the reptilian stage name tells Hickok about “freaks.” It’s during her time with the circus that she becomes aware of her sexuality. There she bunks with Lobster Girl, of the claw-like hands, and Alligator Girl, whose body is covered with thick scales. Bloom also imagines a time when, as a teen, Hickok escapes her dead-end circumstances when she hooks up with the circus. Bloom adds a sexual assault to Hickok’ hardscrabble childhood. It’s known, for instance, that Hickok’s father - a Wisconsin dairy farmer who moved his family to South Dakota - was abusive. Writing a faux memoir is a thorny gesture.

What is unassailably deft is the way Bloom’s Hickok moves between her pre-Eleanor past and their post-affair present with mournful appreciation of and practical wisdom about the arc of love.īy clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy. Readers drawn to the novel hoping to learn something fresh about the New Deal power couple - or how the “closet” has often been a tricky notion in LGBT history - may leave unsurprised. Was it sexual or just deeply romantic? There’s a book devoted to the letters that passed between the two: “Empty Without You.” Susan Quinn’s “Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady” was published in 2016.Īmy Bloom’s new novel, “White Houses,” is a fictional re-imagining of the relationship, written from Hickok’s perspective. Roosevelt biographers have long tussled with the exact nature of their enduring connection. Quickly, the journalist and the future first lady became friends, likely lovers. She’d been assigned by The Associated Press to cover Eleanor Roosevelt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidential campaign. In 1932, journalist Lorena Hickok accompanied the final push of Gov.

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