Edited by Rodger Streitmatter.
This is a comprehensive look at the Eleanor/Hick love relationship, featuring over 300 of their surviving letters to each other (out of 16,000 pages worth!) and helpfully filling in the context of the letters, and writing up what went on whenever the two were together on (frequently inevitably disastrous) vacation trips. The editor admits to focusing on their most significant relationship years of 1933-35 and omitting the duller ones. Things started out well and diminished over the years when Lorena had to quit her beloved career as a reporter over her being "First Friend" and kept trying to find other jobs she didn't hate, and feeling more and more unhappy with that and with not seeing a super busy Eleanor as much. Eleanor thrived on Lorena's admiration, but the more that she got from others/the masses, the less she felt dependent on her. Eleanor ended up financially supporting Lorena a lot. They kept writing and meeting throughout the years, but Eleanor probably felt less after a while. Lorena got another girlfriend for awhile but never got over Eleanor.
I'll admit I'm not sure if I get the appeal of Hick exactly, but she's a much better writer than Eleanor (then again, she's a professional), as the editor notes that Eleanor pretty much had a format of being schmoopy at the beginning and ending of letters and then being "here's what I did today" in the middle.
Notable things:
- Eleanor: "No form of love is to be despised."
- Yes, it sounds like they got laid. And Lorena got gifted with lingerie.
- Lorena (not a fashion plate) reports that someone mistook her for a Girl Scout leader. "My very soul writhes in anguish."
- Every time they got mobbed by the press on vacation, Lorena got pissy. Especially at awful photos.
- I enjoyed Eleanor snarking that she "suddenly felt like being herself and not like the first lady said several things the first lady shouldn't have said."
- Lorena writes about her travels for her traveling job: "You are now in the drought area." He had hardly got the words out when simultaneously we got a flat tire and it started to pour! Hail, too!"
- Eleanor gets this absolutely wrong about their upcoming location: "Of course we are going to have a good time together and neither of us is going to be upset."
- Their 1934 vacation was the worst of many bad ones, in which Lorena just totally lots her shit at reporters, got forced to go camping with a bunch of people who invited themselves along and loved naked cold swimming, fell off her horse into a river, and embarrassed the heck out of Eleanor.
- Eleanor notes that Lorena and Earl Miller "need me more than anyone who things go wrong for neither of us have anyone much nearer to turn to whom I must remember not to offend!"
- Eleanor considered leaving FDR at one point.
- Eleanor: "What a nuisance hearts are and yet without them life would hardly be worthwhile!"
- Eleanor felt like she loved Hick just the same even if she wasn't always returning the love in kind.
- Eleanor: "Why can't someone have this job who'd like it and do something worth while with it?"
- Lorena: "But about 90 percent of the time I'm out of step with life and miserable." I hear ya.
- Eleanor: "Last night I had written questions and was asked if I loved my husband, which I did not answer!"
- "In 1939, they had written each other a daunting 533 letters; by 1944, that figure had plummeted to fifty."
- "I had 800 ladies to tea to-day. It was awful but I think successful!" -life of Eleanor
- Lorena wrote a biography of Eleanor, but it never found a publisher because it "lacked the breath of life."
Overall, four stars. If you want a comprehensive dive into this relationship, here it is.
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