Eleanor by David Michaelis

"All her life, Eleanor believed that she had to earn love--by pleasing others, by undertaking ever more numberless duties, by one more tour of useful Rooseveltian doing.~ from Eleanor by David Michaelis

Compared to her beautiful parents, she was plain. Her mother was a social butterfly and her father was charming. Her mother nicknamed her Granny. Her alcoholic father could make her feel like a princess, but he was unreliable and could not save her. She struggled with confidence all her life.

She found happiness with her grandparents and while away at school where she was mentored by a progressive, free thinking lesbian. She would have liked to become a nurse, but was fated to 'come out' into the marriage market.

She married her cousin when he was still a priggish outsider. She saw him become a handsome ladies man determined to follow their uncle Teddy's career path to the White House. 

She bore nine children. She lost family to alcoholism and disease. When she learned of her husband's infidelity, her mother-in-law forbade divorce. She found love outside of her marriage and family with women and younger men.

"Martha Gellhorn thought of her as 'the loneliest human being I ever knew in my life'."~from Eleanor by David Michaelis

Remarkably, this unfortunate woman turned tragedy into strength, depression into action. She had been ignorant of politics and world affairs and had accepted the status quo understanding of status, race, religion, world affairs. She threw herself into the work of understanding human need. As she traveled the world and the country, she learned, expanded, and became a powerful voice.

She pushed her presidential husband toward positions of equity and inclusiveness and empathy and morality. She expanded the role of the First Lady, a tireless campaigner. 

She was a leader in the United Nations as they forged the first statement of human rights. On the President's Commission on the Status of Women she "identified the issues that soon became the agenda of the women's movement."

David Michaelis has given us a marvelous, empathetic biography of this complex woman. He does not spare Franklin Roosevelt or shroud Eleanor's deep love for Lorena Hickok in doubt. 

Eleanor is a timeless role model who should inspire each generation. Life did not break her, the times did not discourage her, public opinion did not stop her. Eleanor rose above it all to follow her innate moral compass and lead us all to compassion and a just society.

I was given a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Eleanor
by David Michaelis
Simon & Schuster
Pub Date: November 1,  2020   
ISBN 9781439192016
hardcover $35.00 (USD)

from the publisher

Prizewinning bestselling author David Michaelis presents a breakthrough portrait of Eleanor Roosevelt, America’s longest-serving First Lady, an avatar of democracy whose ever-expanding agency as diplomat, activist, and humanitarian made her one of the world’s most widely admired and influential women.

In the first single-volume cradle-to-grave portrait in six decades, acclaimed biographer David Michaelis delivers a stunning account of Eleanor Roosevelt’s remarkable life of transformation. An orphaned niece of President Theodore Roosevelt, she converted her Gilded Age childhood of denial and secrecy into an irreconcilable marriage with her ambitious fifth cousin Franklin. Despite their inability to make each other happy, Franklin Roosevelt transformed Eleanor from a settlement house volunteer on New York’s Lower East Side into a matching partner in New York’s most important power couple in a generation.

When Eleanor discovered Franklin’s betrayal with her younger, prettier social secretary, Lucy Mercer, she offered a divorce and vowed to face herself honestly. Here is an Eleanor both more vulnerable and more aggressive, more psychologically aware and sexually adaptable than we knew. She came to accept FDR’s bond with his executive assistant, Missy LeHand; she allowed her children to live their own lives, as she never could; and she explored her sexual attraction to women, among them a star female reporter on FDR’s first presidential campaign, and younger men.

Eleanor needed emotional connection. She pursued deeper relationships wherever she could find them. Throughout her life and travels, there was always another person or place she wanted to heal. As FDR struggled to recover from polio, Eleanor became a voice for the voiceless, her husband’s proxy in presidential ambition, and then the people’s proxy in the White House. Later, she would be the architect of international human rights and world citizen of the Atomic Age, urging Americans to cope with the anxiety of global annihilation by cultivating a “world mind.” She insisted that we cannot live for ourselves alone but must learn to live together or we will die together.

Drawing on new research, Michaelis’s riveting portrait is not just a comprehensive biography of a major American figure, but the story of an American ideal: how our freedom is always a choice. Eleanor rediscovers a model of what is noble and evergreen in the American character, a model we need today more than ever.