Lucy
by Ellen Feldman
List Price: $13.95
Pages: 304
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0393325105
Publisher: W.W. Norton
Ellen Feldman is the author of several novels as well as magazine articles about American history. She lives in New York City with her husband.
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The story of Lucy Mercer and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt has fascinated historians for more than half a century. An historian by training, a novelist by profession, I had long flirted with the idea of writing about this monumental love affair that almost derailed the twentieth century. Several years ago, when contemporary events once again raised the issue of where public life stops and private life begins, I decided the time had come.
The tale is not only emotionally potent but also historically critical. If FDR had opted for divorce, he probably never would have become president. If Eleanor Roosevelt had not known betrayal, she might have lived out her life as a dutiful wife and mother rather than as a force for peace and social justice throughout the world.
The question I am most often asked about the book is why I decided to write it as a novel rather than as a biography or history. The tale of Lucy Mercer and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt is a love story, a love triangle. Love stories cannot be understood in terms of policy papers or cabinet minutes or diplomatic and military documents. They can be fathomed only by making the leap into the hearts and minds of the individuals involved --- not the larger-than-life historical figures we have come to revere, but the human beings who endured the ordeal.
The thrill of writing about American icons and an incident that helped shape twentieth-century history came not from invention but from discovery. I could not change events or alter characters. I had to dig deeper into them. That is why I decided to tell the story as fiction. I was determined to stick to the facts --- and I have --- but I was striving to get at the truth of a great human drama, and for that only fiction will do.
Excerpted from Lucy © Copyright 2012 by Ellen Feldman. Reprinted with permission by W.W. Norton. All rights reserved.
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