If you’re lucky and fall hard for the right person, you’re going to set a fire somewhere and if it is the right person, at the right time and in the right place – that is a gift from the universe.ĭid being a psychotherapist give you any insight you would not otherwise have had? You write: “We play with fire and tell ourselves we are just lighting a modest, necessary candle.” Has this been true for you?
I had to think about what it is like to see each other and know that the way you gaze upon each other is not the gaze the world delivers and to be grown up enough not to confuse the two. It was – the idea you might see beauty where there is no apparent beauty. I was moved by the description of love in middle age – was that part of the story’s appeal? It’s legitimate to use any figure as a leaping-off point but my interest was to work from known facts – I did not make Eleanor Roosevelt into a leggy blond showgirl. You might, say, take your sister’s sense of humour – you steal from the living and the dead. In all fiction, there are elements of people who lived. What responsibility is involved in writing fiction about people who once lived? There were “I Hate Eleanor” clubs in the south. Eleanor had been in the public light for a long time and experienced a high level of vitriolic commentary about her appearance, politics, parenting. Was Lorena more concerned about Eleanor’s reputation than Eleanor was herself?Ībsolutely. And in fact Lorena, who was always concerned about Eleanor’s reputation, burned a couple of hundred letters before she made her donation to the Roosevelt library. In one, Eleanor writes to “Hick”: “I long to kiss you on the south-east corner of your lips and lie beside you all night.” This – clearly – is not a letter between pals. Certain letters are always quoted to reveal the nature of their relationship. It was wonderful and out of body because you are in the Roosevelt library and there are people sitting next to you with white cotton gloves on and there were 3,000 letters. What was the experience of reading the letters like? But this made me think: what would it have been like to admire the president of the United States with your whole heart and be madly in love with his wife? And once I got to see the love letters between Eleanor and Lorena, I was off to the races.
I had been reading several Roosevelt biographies researching Lucky Us. How important was Blanche Wiesen Cook’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt as a starting point?
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