Image taken with my Samsung Galaxy S20 of the screen of my local library's search engine.
My recent vacation got off to a rainy start. My best friend and I flew to Orlando the day before our cruise departed. The sky was overcast when we landed but by the time we arrived at our hotel a light drizzle had set in. We each got lunch from nearby restaurants which we ate under the covered patio of the hotel as the rain started in earnest. We discussed what to do on this rainy afternoon and decided that we could use the free access to Showtime that was included on the hotel room's television to watch a show we'd both heard about - The First Lady.
When we watched, five episodes were available. The show has gotten poor reviews from critics and from many fans as well. However, we both thoroughly enjoyed those five episodes and have decided we'll do a Showtime free preview to finish the season when we spend some time together this winter.
If you're not familiar with the show, it weaves together the lives of first ladies Michelle Obama, Betty Ford, and Eleanor Roosevelt into narratives around central themes like their lives before becoming first lady, how they use their voices, and the crises they faced in their marriages and careers. As we watched, we both would request/take show pauses so we could look something up on our phone or just chat about what we'd just watched.
I had not known before this show about Eleanor's relationship with Lorena Hickok or "Hick". Watching The First Lady made me want to know more about all three of the first ladies profiled. I read Michelle Obama's Becoming soon after it came out so I looked on my library's web site for biographies of Mrs. Roosevelt and came across Susan Quinn's Eleanor and Hick.
The special relationship Eleanor formed with Lorena Hickok was chronicled in more than 3300 letters the two women exchanged between 1932 and 1962 when Eleanor Roosevelt died. I found the time Hick spent on the road working as what I've termed a field correspondent during the New Deal to be the most interesting part of the book. You got to see Hick's passion and how it fueled Eleanor's actions at a time when she an FDR maintained a reasonable working relationship.
I will say that I didn't find Quinn's subtitle - "The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady" to be accurate. I don't think that Quinn proved in any way that the relationship with Hick shaped Eleanor in any way. Eleanor had brief periods of time, as described in the book, where she dealt with a depression based on the circumstances around her. Hick helped break through these in some way but their relationship - as Quinn described it - did little to shape Eleanor.
I did appreciate Eleanor and Hick as an opportunity to learn about the lives of these two intriguing women as well as some of the other female relationships that surrounded them. Particularly as Pride Month kicks off in the US, it was a good book to read.
