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GoodReads giveaway today. Don't miss it! (GoodReads is fun. If you're a book lover, it's the place for you.) Oh, and good luck!
Reading note: “Luck?" Drizzt replied. "Perhaps. But more often, I dare to say, luck is simply the advantage a true warrior gains in executing the correct course of action.”--R.A. Savatore, The Halfling's Gem
St. John's wort, blooming on Midsummer's Eve. In medieval Europe, this plant (Hypericum perforatum) was thought to be magical. Burned in the Midsummer's Eve bonfires, it was supposed to chase away the devil as the year spiraled down into the darkness of winter. With its sunny blossom, it has long been reputed to lift the low-spirited and cheer the melancholy; contemporary research suggest that it's as effective as OTC anti-depressants for mild depression. Look closely at the photo, and you may see a cheerful, non-depressed green spider.
Homestead report. Tomatoes, and lots of them. I made tomato sauce for the freezer last week. But the bunnies got my sweet potatoes. Grrrr... The snakes would like to get The Girls' eggs, but I have a surprise for them. I captured (and released) three bull snakes last week. The biggest was close to six feet. I sprayed him with a streak of white paint: if he comes back, he'll be deported in the next county.
Book report. Doing revisions on The General's Women, working through the full draft for the second time. Once more ought to do it--aiming to be finished by the end of July. I've started research on another historical, but I'll probably write the next China Bayles mystery (Queen Anne's Lace) first.
Reading note. Writers write. They write anyway. You don't quit because nobody buys the books. You just do it anyway because it's your nature. You have stories to tell.--Philip R. Craig
The daylilies are blooming beside the creek. The petals of this lovely hybrid remind me of peach-pink taffeta. If they remind you of salad, that's okay too: the petals are edible, either fresh or dried. And yes, they do make a lovely addition to a fresh green salad. The buds are edible too. Harvest them while they're green and firm and steam, boil, or stir-fry them. Or pickle them, if that takes your fancy. (Some people are allergic: if this is a new food for you, snack first to see how your system responds.)
In the West, daylilies never quite caught on, medicinally speaking. But in the East, in China and Japan, they have been used for centuries as a diuretic, and for urinary tract disorders, uterine bleeding, vaginal yeast infections--also to treat cancer. The next time you meet a daylily, remember that she's not just a pretty face. Treat her with respect.
Book report. Still chugging along on my current work-in-progress, The General's Women. This is a long book: about 120,000 words. That's some 40% longer than my usual mysteries--but understandable, since there's so much more to cover. I enjoy digging deep into a time period and a place--and this novel involves plenty of both. It covers the time period of America's engagement in WW II: 1942-1945, as well as the post-war lives of the three main characters: Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower and Kay Summersby (Ike's WW2 driver). It is set in Washington, London, Algeria and Tunisia, and Europe. There's a wealth of resource material, of course. For me, the big challenge is pulling it all together into a coherent story that focuses on the emotional lives of the characters within a fascinating historical setting. I've been doing some chapter restructuring this week--hope to be finished with this run-through by the end of June. I'll make another, cleanup pass in July.
Reading note: I learned that you should feel when writing, not like Lord Byron on a mountain top, but like a child stringing beads in kindergarten - happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.--Brenda Ueland
This is Part 2 of a series of posts about Lorena Hickok, the journalist whose friendship helped to put Eleanor Roosevelt into the media spotlight--and the central character in my novel, Loving Eleanor. Part 1 is about Hick's work as a journalist. But she didn't just write newspaper stories. After she retired from political life in 1945, she wrote biographies. This post is a quick sketch of that part of her writing career.
In 1952, at the suggestion of Eleanor's literary agent, Nannine Joseph, Hick undertook the writing of profiles of women in political life--the first book of its kind. Called Ladies of Courage, it was an inspiring account of women’s struggle for recognition in American public and political life in the thirty-five years since women had gained the vote. ER lent the luster of her name to the book and Tommy typed the manuscript, but Hick spent the better part of two years on the research—including extensive interviews with her subjects—and the writing. Before she submitted the finished manuscript, she shared it with ER, who wrote: At last tonight I’ve finished reading your material [for Ladies of Courage] and it is simply swell I think. Much more interesting than I thought it could possibly be made.
The book, which included profiles of Frances Perkins, Clare Boothe Luce, Helen Gahagan Douglas, and Oveta Culp Hobby, was published in 1954. Thanks to ER’s name recognition, it received extensive newspaper attention. Hick traveled around the country, speaking to women’s groups about the book and about the challenges women faced in political life. In recognition of her authorship, ER assigned her the royalties, which cumulatively amounted to about $4,000 (about $35,000 in 2015).
As a journalist, Hick had always been deeply interested in people who had stories, who met extraordinary challenges. In the profiles of the Ladies of Courage, Hick had found a narrative voice that enabled her to tell these stories. After that book was published, she began work on what would be three biographies for young readers in Grosset & Dunlap’s much-heralded Signature Books series: The Story of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1956), The Story of Helen Keller (1958), and The Story of Eleanor Roosevelt (1959). For Scholastic, Hick also wrote a biography of FDR, this one focusing on his early political life: The Road to the White House: FDR, The Pre-Presidential Years (1962).
Of the four books for young readers, Hick’s biography of Helen Keller was the most successful. It was adopted by several school-affiliated book clubs, and sales were boosted even further by the 1957 teleplay by William Gibson, The Miracle Worker, followed by the Broadway play and the 1962 film of the starring Patty Duke. The royalties would help to support Hick for the rest of her life.
When Hick was doing the research for the Keller biography, she became deeply interested in Keller’s teacher, and went on to write a biography for older teens called The Touch of Magic: The Story of Helen Keller's Great Teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy. The book was published by Dodd, Mead in 1961. Hick felt a special admiration for Macy, who had given Helen Keller her voice. “No author ever finished a book with greater regret,” she wrote in her foreword. “During the months I worked on this book she became as real to me as a living person . . . I miss her.” I can’t help wondering if Hick saw something of herself in Anne Sullivan Macy. Perhaps Hick thought that the empowering help she gave Eleanor—encouraging her to do the press conferences, supporting her early efforts as a writer, urging her to write her newspaper column—was something like the help that Teacher (Helen Keller's name for Macy) provided her student. Teacher gave Helen her voice and helped to create a place for her in the world. It's no exaggeration to say that Hick gave Eleanor her voice, as well.
While Hick was working on the Macy biography, she struck up a professional friendship with Allen Klots, her editor at Dodd, Mead. When The Touch of Magic was finished, Hick proposed to Klots the project that became Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady, the book for which Hick is probably best known. It sketches out their most intense friendship without, of course, giving clues to its intimacy. Finished in 1961, Reluctant First Lady was published just prior to ER’s death. it sold well and the royalties from that and her other projects provided Hick with something approaching a comfortable living.
Throughout her adult life, Hick was severely diabetic, and the disease began to curtail her professional activities in the late 1930s. When she finished Reluctant First Lady, she began a biography of labor leader Walter Reuther (also for Dodd, Mead), but her failing eyesight compelled her to stop not long before her death in 1968. That project was completed by Jean Gould and published under the title Walter Reuther: Labor’s Rugged Individualist—with Hick’s name on the cover, as well as Gould’s. That book brought to eight the number of biographies Hick produced in the last fifteen years of her life.
And speaking of biographies: a new dual biography of Hick and Eleanor, by Susan Quinn, will be out in September. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm anxious to read it. I hope that Quinn will pay attention to Hick as a writer, as well as the woman who helped to give Eleanor Roosevelt her voice. Hick's first biographer, Doris Faber, failed her. She deserves a biographer who understands and pays attention to her professional work, as well as her empowering friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt.
Reading note: It's best not to tell a story at all unless you know you can do it right. You must be very careful, for without knowing it you can change the world.--Vera Nazarian
There are some unique challenges in biographical fiction.
Over the years, I’ve written historical novels featuring Beatrix Potter, Rose Wilder Lane, Jennie Churchill, Lily Langtry, Rudyard Kipling, and more. All of these books have required quite a lot of research, which is supposed to reveal the full story. It never does, of course--it just reveals more questions. Biographical fiction, which toes a delicate line between acknowledged fact and imagined truth, creates its own special research and writing demands. And sometimes, extraordinary challenges.
For Loving Eleanor—the story of Lorena Hickok's friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt —I started in the usual place: by reading everything I could find about Lorena (Hick, she was called). As it turned out, there wasn't much readily accessible material, except for brief introductions to her Depression-era investigative reports to Harry Hopkins, a woefully inadequate biography published in 1980 by Doris Faber, and Rodger Streitmatter's notes in Empty Without You, his collection of letters written by Hick and Eleanor. I had a lot of digging to do.
Hick was a woman who went through life with her elbows out. She began working as a journalist at the Battle Creek Journal in 1913 when she was just 19. She had a gift for telling a taut, well-honed story, and her abilities were quickly recognized. Two years later, she moved to the Milwaukee Sentinel, briefly to the New York Tribune, then (in 1918), to the Minneapolis Tribune, where she earned her stripes as a reporter, feature writer, and Sunday editor. In an unusual move, her editor, Tom Dillon, assigned her to the sports desk. Her breezy, conversational style was new to sports journalism, and as a female sportswriter, her work was groundbreaking.
In 1927, at the end of a failed love affair, Hick went back to New York, first to the tabloid Mirror and then to the Associated Press. She was the first woman to be hired in the flagship New York bureau. Fearless and energetic, she quickly earned a by-line. In her first year at the AP, she covered the sinking of the steamship Vestris, which gave her another first: she was the first woman to have a bylined front page story in the New York Times. As an investigative reporter, she covered politics (FDR’s election as New York governor in 1928); political corruption (the downfall of New York mayor Jimmy Walker and the hugely complicated trial of banker Charles E. Mitchell); and sensational crime (the Lindbergh baby kidnapping). I’ve found her bylined stories in hundreds of newspapers across the country, and almost every story is a standout.
In 1933, at the top of her game, Hick left the AP. It was an anguished decision she felt she was forced to make. Her deepening personal (and very intimate) friendship with the new First Lady made it impossible for her to write objectively about the Roosevelt administration. She believed that she was ethically compromised, and she did the honest--but very painful--thing. She went to work for Harry Hopkins, the director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. For the next two years, she traveled across the country, investigating government-sponsored relief programs and reporting on Depression-era conditions in 32 states. Her nearly 80 confidential FERA reports, written in bleak hotel rooms late at night, provide us with vivid, no-holds-barred descriptions of the appalling—and yet heroic—plight of millions of destitute Americans. She felt their anguish. Even now, reading her reports, we can feel it, too.
When Hick left FERA in 1936, it was the end of her work as an investigative journalist--but not the end of her writing career. In another post, we'll take a look at her 15-year career as a biographer.
Reading note: The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.--Geraldine Brooks
I've always been more interested in her stories than I am in histories—stories of women who have set out to do things, discover things, make their way in a man’s world, even change that world and the people in it. I was fascinated, recently, to learn about Aloha Wanderwell, the first woman to drive around the world. Like Nellie Bly and Amelia Earhart, Aloha was the product of a colossal, long-running publicity campaign that was managed by men. But quite independently of all that horn tootin', she was an amazing woman. There's more about her here--and more to the story than the Wanderwell expedition. Another woman who dreamed of a life without boundaries and never asked permission for anything.
My interest in her stories led me to Lorena Hickok, the first woman AP reporter and the woman who put Eleanor Roosevelt in the newspapers.
There's lots more about Hick and Mrs. Roosevelt in Loving Eleanor. The Kindle edition is on sale for 99 cents (such a deal!) June 9-13.
Reading note: Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.--Nora Ephron