After writing press releases for a circus, she joined an aunt in Chicago, attended high school and found employment as a newspaper reporter. At fourteen she was supporting herself as a housemaid. Lorena, in contrast fought her way up from a Nebraskan girlhood with an abusive, impoverished father. Though privileged, she suffered from low self-esteem and grief over her parents, then an unfulfilling marriage and a domineering mother-in-law. Hers was a world of private schools, multiple homes, European travel and genteel volunteer work. Her first thought on seeing Eleanor in a cheap blue serge dress and flat shoes was, “In the name of Christ, who dressed you?”Įleanor, the niece of former President Theodore Roosevelt, came from a wealthy (though troubled) New York family. Roosevelt, wife of the New York governor and president-elect.
This weekend is the present of the story, the through line to which the many memories and flashbacks are attached. In 1932, Lorena, who worked for the Associated Press, interviewed Mrs. Lorena (“Hick” to her friends) is, at Eleanor’s invitation, preparing Eleanor’s New York apartment for a weekend together. The novel opens on April 27th 1945, two weeks after the death of U.S. Sadder but wiser, she reflects: “ It’s not true that if you can imagine it, you can have it.” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt became romantically involved in 1932, they dreamed of a life together a cottage on the Roosevelt estate, where “ the kids would come to see how happy I made their mother… our love would create its own world,” as Lorena puts it. The salty yet poetic narrator of White Houses makes this historical romance, in memoir form, engaging and moving. Subject matter and style combine to make Amy Bloom’s latest novel outstanding.
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