As Hick tells us, 'Eleanor made him look good on the left, and gave him wiggle room on the right, his whole political career. It might not be a romance, but it is a marriage, and a friendship, and a power pact. (A lot of things rhyme with Hick.)'Īs complex as the relationship between the two women is, the Roosevelts' marriage is much more complicated. I sang to Eleanor, every hymn I'd ever learned and dirty songs to make her put her hands over her ears. We had Eleanor's very sporty light-blue Buick roadster and enough money for everything we wanted, or even were just in the mood for.

'We had new love and this beautiful country, reckless and wide. The two women take a camping trip - no Secret Service, no press gaggle - that Hick will forever remember as a golden time. He also, even more obligingly, winks at his wife's new romance - in exchange for getting a pass on his own multiple affairs. Hick has to resign her job, but Franklin obligingly gives her one with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. By the time Franklin is inaugurated, Hick is invited to move into the White House, where, Eleanor assures her, there is plenty of room. She stoically describes a childhood of grinding poverty in a tiny Western town, made worse by her mother's death and her father's abuse. The outlines of Eleanor's life are well known Bloom devotes much of the book to Hick's recounting of her own backstory. The story will circle back many times to that moment in their relationship, Eleanor devastated, Hick determined to comfort her. The novel begins with a reunion between the pair at Eleanor's New York apartment on Washington Square just after Franklin Roosevelt's death in 1945, years after their romance had burned out. Bloom chronicles this complex affair, and in Hick, who narrates the book, she creates an engaging, poignant, self-aware character who's a delight to spend time with. In this case the roadblocks are enormous: Eleanor is not just married, but married to the president of the United States, who happens to be one of the most charismatic men in history the two women's lesbian romance is totally socially unacceptable at the time Hick's flourishing career as a reporter is derailed by her conflict of interest Eleanor's social activism and fame increasingly keep the pair apart.īut love conquers all, at least some of the time. Bloom's book is not biography but fiction, specifically a love story, and love stories are always about what difficulties the lovers must overcome to be together.

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