When I first met Sarah Miller, she was anticipating the launch of her novel Caroline, a retelling of Little House on the Prairie, which fired up “bonnetheads”—as the multitudinous diehard Laura Ingalls Wilder fans call themselves—in both positive and negative ways. While she’s written similar adult retellings of children’s classics (Marmee, her take on Little Women), the bulk of Miller’s work involves deeply researched, engagingly written nonfiction focusing on women in the margins and footnotes of history.
Her latest project, a YA nonfiction book titled Hick, recounts the life of Lorena Hickok, journalist and longtime romantic partner of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. I sat down to talk with Sarah about this latest topic, her interest in YA nonfiction, and why she thinks we should all know about Hick.
Kay Daly
Since she’s not a household name, let’s start with a little overview of Lorena Hickok. Give me your elevator pitch on who she is and why she’s worthy of attention.
Sarah Miller
You want the saucy one?
Kay Daly
Let’s start with saucy.
Sarah Miller
My standard line when I’m messing with people is to say, “If you’ve heard of Lorena Hickok, it’s because she’s known for smooching with Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Kay Daly
Okay, now, give me the serious historian version.
Sarah Miller
Lorena Hickok came into the public consciousness around 1980. She died in 1968, and her papers were donated to the Franklin Delano Presidential Library. The collection was opened 10 years after her death, and—lo and behold!—it includes 10 monstrous archival boxes that contain her correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt is known for having voluminous correspondence, and this is huge.
It’s also very emotionally close, very emotionally intimate. There are unequivocal spots where they say we embrace, we kiss. They are physically affectionate, and the world kind of loses its mind because it’s 1978, and to have this evidence that Eleanor Roosevelt had an emotionally, physically, and possibly sexually intimate relationship with a woman—well, pearls were clutched.
But the thing is, with Lorena Hickok, there’s so much more. How did she get from being born above a creamery in Nowhere, Wisconsin, to living in the White House? Before that, she was one of the Associated Press’s top reporters. As a woman in 1932, she covered the Lindbergh kidnapping!
So there’s this enormous public intrigue initially about the relationship. But as important as that is Hick herself. She was a trailblazer for women in journalism, and that is very much overlooked nowadays.
Kay Daly
With Hick, you’ve written YA nonfiction. What’s your pitch to a 15-year-old about why they should read this?
Sarah Miller
Here’s this brassy, pipe-smoking broad who climbs the ladder in the 1930s to the top of journalism. How do you do that? She started with nothing, not even a direction. All she ever knew as a kid was, I want self-respect, and I want an education. And then she lives in the White House before she dies. How do you get from absolutely nothing to “My address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but I’m not the President?” Oh, and by the way, she was really close with the First Lady.
Kay Daly
How did you come to learn about Hick? When did she enter your consciousness?
Sarah Miller
I don’t have a specific instigating event. I did ask for Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady by Susan Quinn for Christmas when it came out in 2016, and then I didn’t read it for a couple of years. But there was this abiding interest. My mom always thought Eleanor Roosevelt was a great person. She’s correct; there’s a lot to admire there. So when I learned about this secret relationship—how are you not intrigued by that? I was, but in a more low-key way than my usual obsessions. I gradually crept up on it.
Kay Daly
Were there any other biographies you consulted in writing Hick?
Sarah Miller
There’s the initial biography by former New York Times reporter Doris Faber, Life of Lorena Hickok, E. R.’s Friend, from 1980. It’s impeccably researched. She went out to Michigan and South Dakota to interview people who had known Hick. But she did it to disprove the relationship, more or less.
Her conclusions I take issue with, but her research, I absolutely do not. So much of what we know about Hick is because of what Doris Faber did. But she makes conclusions that, I think, are just flatly denied by what the words in the letters say. She was from a generation for whom to even think this about Eleanor Roosevelt was to besmirch her character.
There also seems to be this, maybe unconscious, attempt to make Hick undesirable. As if to say, Even if Eleanor were queer, she wouldn’t want somebody like Hick. She wouldn’t want somebody who’s moody and financially unstable and clingy. She’s not that pretty, you know. All that kind of stuff.
Kay Daly
Your books have been shelved both with YA and with adult books. Why did you choose YA nonfiction on this person?
Sarah Miller
In part because there are existing adult biographies of Lorena Hickok. I also think she’s one of those people that, if you’re a queer teen, you deserve to know about. She’s got a lot going for her. She achieved a great deal in her own right. You could write a whole book about Lorena Hickok that doesn’t involve Eleanor Roosevelt: what she accomplished journalistically, what she accomplished through her government work through the New Deal during the Great Depression. It is worthy of notice.
Kay Daly
You have described yourself as engaging in “method history.” What does that mean to you, and in what way did you engage in that for Hick?
Sarah Miller
As an example of method history, when I was researching Lizzie Borden for The Borden Murders, I went to Fall River, where the murder was committed, and stayed overnight in Lizzie Borden’s bedroom. On eBay, I found an Underhill Edge Tool Company #1 shingling hatchet, the one that was presented as evidence, and took it out to the woodpile for a few practice whacks. I discovered how shockingly easy it is for an absolute rookie with a hatchet to land 11 blows in a space a few inches wide, which is what happened to Mr. Borden. I’m a lady of the right age, with the right weapon, the right amount of experience, and the right physical dimensions, and I can do this in 10 seconds. I realized it was a whole lot easier than it was made out to be at the trial.
Kay Daly
That’s creepy.
Sarah Miller
Yeah. Creepy. But getting into a wagon from the 1860s, putting on calico, and getting yourself a corset and butchering a deer [which Miller did for her novel Caroline]—there weren’t equivalents to that with Hick. What I could do was dig and dig and dig into all these newspaper databases. God bless them! Because I have around 700 articles that she wrote so I can see what makes her journalism so good. I can go to the FDR Library and sit there and read all of those letters for myself, which took ages. But it’s the best way to get that full, rounded picture, to get all the words, because that’s what they left us. I mean, if I wanted to, I could try to take up smoking and learn some new swear words, get a German shepherd. I don’t know.
Kay Daly
In Hick, you take some pains to explain older attitudes towards homosexuality, towards queer identity. Is that because this younger audience didn’t live through the great evolution that we’ve seen in the last 50 or so years?
Sarah Miller
I don’t know to what degree kids are aware of how much things have changed. Hick was born in 1893. At what point did she figure herself out? We don’t really know.
Hick would have been surprised, I think, to find out that there were other people like her. Your kids today have the Internet and know all that kind of stuff. In my research, there was never a moment when I found a sentence written by Hick that said, “I love women. I am a Lesbian.” It has to be inferred, and it’s not hard to infer. But it’s almost like circumstantial evidence. There’s a mountain of it, you know, but it’s never stated overtly.
Kay Daly
Hick is not your first brush with controversy. I know that with Caroline, your retelling of Little House on the Prairie from the mother’s point of view, there was a bit of backlash and complaint from some of the so-called bonnetheads [fans of Laura Ingalls Wilder]. If I recall, they took issue with your suggestion that Ma and Pa Ingalls had (gasp!) at some point had sex. Do you expect controversy arising from this book?
Sarah Miller
Given the political situation at the moment, it’s going to be a sort of a new wave of that [the old denial of Eleanor Roosevelt’s sexual orientation]. There are still people who will look at the words on those papers that are written with Eleanor Roosevelt’s hand and Lorena Hickok’s hand and say no, they didn’t mean what the words say. They meant something different. You can say that if you read a few of those letters in isolation, but when you read them by the thousands, you can’t deny it. I don’t think there’s any sense in denying it anymore.
Kay Daly
Are you ready for the lightning round?
Sarah Miller
Oh, God. Yes?
Kay Daly
Eleanor Roosevelt: Gay or Straight? (I will also accept “queer.”)
Sarah Miller
Queer. She fell in love with men, and she clearly fell in love with at least one woman. So …
Kay Daly
Book bannings: good or bad?
Sarah Miller
Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad. How many a’s can we have? Because that’s at least five.
Kay Daly
Excluding Eleanor, your favorite First Lady?
Sarah Miller
That’s an impossible question. Are there other First Ladies?
Kay Daly
Lorena Hickok was known as “Hick.” Give me your 1930s-style nickname.
Sarah Miller
Oh, man, no! You do it!
Kay Daly
You can get back to me with that.
Sarah Miller
How about “Little Red”?
Kay Daly
Sure. Favorite newspaper story by Hick?
Sarah Miller
There’s one. It’s not signed by her; it’s signed as the girl cub reporter. But I know darn well, it’s her. She’s in the pictures. She’s covering a circus that’s come to town. It’s just fluff, really, but she goes to the circus and rides in the parade on a horse. She tries on costumes. There are four pictures of her, with these animals, and in costume, and it’s adorable. She’s having such fun. She’s smiling. You rarely see her like that. So to see her in this get-up standing in front of an elephant who’s got one leg raised—just grinning from ear to ear—is so fun.
That said, there is also a football story that I mention in the book, the one where the University of Minnesota Gophers get whooped by the University of Michigan Wolverines. She tells the fans back home, “Don’t you be sorry because they did so good.” It’s one that just destroys me, knowing how she felt about her sports coverage. It was like a trophy to her.
Kay Daly
Are you crying?
Sarah Miller
Shut up!
Kay Daly
Historical figure from your work you feel most akin to? (I will accept no answer but Lizzy Borden.)
Sarah Miller
It would be Lizzie Borden.
Kay Daly
Okay, fair enough. Now, my last lightning-round question. How do you plan to shock us next?
Sarah Miller
Cannibalism.
Kay Daly
Alrighty then.
YA NONFICTION
Hick
By Sarah Miller
Random House Studio
Published May 27, 2025
