The BookReport

Sally Bedell Smith & Michael Tucker at BookHampton

In researching her biography, Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (Random House), Sally Bedell Smith told rapt listeners that there was “Something unexpected around every corner.”

Smith was in East Hampton to discuss her best-selling biography of Queen Elizabeth this past Saturday at BookHampton.

“I wanted to part the curtain and tell what she's really like as a wife, a mother, a friend, as well as a world leader.” Smith also wanted to focus on the Queen's relationship with America, something British biographies have not explored in-depth.

Queen Elizabeth, the longest-serving leader in the world, celebrated her diamond jubilee in February of this year. If she serves through 2015, she will exceed her great-great grandmother Queen Victoria's reign.

Smith was emphatic that Queen Elizabeth is more than just a figurehead in British government.  “She fully exercises her right to be consulted, to encourage and to warn,” noted Smith, referring to Queen Elizabeth's long-running weekly meetings with her 12 total Prime Ministers – beginning with Winston Churchill himself, who was impressed by the young Queen's “remarkable attentiveness.”

Smith spent much time traveling with and observing the Queen, in official, social and intimate conditions. The biography relies on her own observations and extensive interviews with the Queen's friends, family and staff. Smith especially loved seeing Queen Elizabeth in relaxed familial environments, where her “Gaiety of spirit, dry wit, animated gestures and sparkling blue eyes” charmed all present.

Smith's hour-long discussion of the biography was only a taste of the book's content. Exhaustive and remarkable, Elizabeth the Queen is a masterwork by one of the foremost biographers of our day. Signed copies are available.

On Sunday, award-winning journalist Lynn Sherr interviewed author and actor Michael Tucker, whose novel After Annie (Overlook Press) has been called “Darkly comic” by Booklist. The discussion ranged across Tucker's writing, cooking, acting and love of Italy.

Tucker, best known for his role on LA Law, was inspired to write his first novel while his wife, the actress Jill Eikenberry, was dealing with a recurrence of breast cancer. “I had gotten used to the word 'cancer,'” explained Tucker to Sherr, describing a scene that kept looping through his mind: leaving Eikenberry's hospital room to go to a bar, but never arriving at the bar, instead just wandering the streets around New York City's Mt. Sinai Hospital. Removing himself further from his own situation, Tucker created the novel's character Herbie – perhaps inspired by Tucker's good friend actor Sam Levine – to deal with losing a wife to cancer.

By having Herbie deal with his wife Annie's death, Tucker was able to come to terms with Eikenberry's illness. However, Tucker said, “None of the characters or plot are autobiographical.”

In response, Eikenberry told the audience: “I'm going to show up at every book signing to show that I'm still alive!”

Charline is Reading: After Annie

On Sunday March 25th at 2pm the wonderful actor Michael Tucker will join us at BookHampton to celebrate the publication of his new novel, After Annie (Overlook Press).

Known and beloved to literally millions as a film and television actor (his role on LA Law brought him many Emmy and Golden Globe nominations) Michael Tucker is also an exceptional writer. Most enchanting perhaps is his earlier book, Living in a Foreign Language, which chronicled his life with his wife, actress Jill Eikenberry, in the Italian countryside.

Blanche Weisen Cook on Eleanor Roosevelt

A packed house of readers and history-lovers attended Blanche Weisen Cook's discussion of the life of Eleanor Roosevelt at BookHampton, East Hampton Saturday afternoon. The timing was perfect, as March 17th was the 107th Anniversary of the complex partnership that was Franklin Delano and Eleanor Roosevelt's marriage.

Cook, Distinguished Professor at John Jay College in New York City, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize-winning author, was at BookHampton in honor of Women's History Month, and to announce the completion of the third and final volume of her biography of Eleanor Roosevelt.  

How did Eleanor Roosevelt become one of Cook's great influences? After a terrible prank that left her a gymnast with a broken back, Cook realized her hopes of an athletic career were over. She changed majors and turned to history, politics and writing. After a column she wrote about Dwight D. Eisenhower was published, the then-publisher of Doubleday called and asked her to write a book on Eisenhower. While she at first demurred, Cook was convinced by her agent to take on the project, which became The Declassified Eisenhower: A Divided Legacy of Peace and Political Warfare. She then went on to begin what became a life's work: Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume One 1884-1933, and Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 2 The Defining Years, 1933-1938.

Among her many great works, Eleanor Roosevelt supported the formation of the United Nations, served as a delegate to the UN General Assembly and chaired the United Nations committee that drafted and approved the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She was a great champion of civil rights, and while she opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, she chaired the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women during JFK's administration.

However, it is her personal life that has long been a fascination. Eleanor Roosevelt's relationships with FDR and others have been seen as controversial, but an intimate look through Cook's biographies helps remove the prurient from the personal, explaining all along what drove Eleanor Roosevelt.

"Is anybody going to be enough to fill your empty heart?" Eleanor Roosevelt wrote these words to a friend, at the same time revealing the great theme of her own life, according to Cook. Left an orphan at a young age, her heart ached for love that she would spend her life seeking, and she turned that need into a drive for social good. Eleanor was savvy and self knowing enough to recognize that her choices had left her wanting (she famously eschewed therapists and therapy, being a great believer that all true and real change must come from within); near the end of her life, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, "I once thought personal happiness didn't matter, but I think differently today."

Next week we are thrilled and privileged to welcome Sally Bedell Smith, whose biography of Queen Elizabeth II has been an international best seller since publication.

Charline is Reading: Elizabeth the Queen

The idea of a strong woman, one who can hold her own in the world, has been idealized ever since Cleopatra. The role of the monarch, whether beneficent or despotic, has hardly had to evolve; to be as one wishes seemed to be one of the many perks of majeste. It is wonderfully surprising to discover that Elizabeth, Queen of England, who is about to celebrate her 60th Anniversary on the throne, is perhaps the very model of a 21st century sovereign.  

Sally Bedell Smith's compelling new biography Elizabeth the Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (Random House) offers us a  brilliant look at the evolution of Elizabeth's public and private persona.

Jeremy is Reading: Berlin Stories

The wonderful New York Review Books — which I praise frequently on this site — has done it again. Just after releasing the first English translation of Gregor von Rezzori's An Ermine in Czernopol, which I wrote about just last week, they have now published a collection of short pieces by Robert Walser called Berlin Stories. I have written about Walser before (The Tanners and Microscripts) , but the works in this short volume are all focused on the period, starting around 1905 and lasting for a few years, in which he lived in Berlin. In doing so he was following the path set by his older brother Karl, who had moved to Berlin earlier and became a very prominent scenic designer in the theater there. Walser tried to make his living by writing short pieces of the sort included in this book for magazines and newspapers.

Sara Benincasa on Agorafabulous!

Writer, comedian and all around funny smart-woman Sara Benincasa (joined by her brave mother) read from her new memoir Agorafabulous! Saturday afternoon in our East Hampton store.

A brave mix of Girl, Interrupted and Bossypants, Benincasa's memoir recounts the breakdown she suffered as a undergrad at Emerson College and the bumpy road back to (relative) mental health.

"I'm a mix of antidepressants from here down," Benincasa joked, her hand saluting from brow level. "And my brain is just awash with them!"

Reading from a chapter in Agorafabulous! that describes her struggle to find a job while recovering from agoraphobia and a resulting eating disorder, Benincasa had the assembled listeners laughing out loud as she told of an ersatz job interview at a New Age compound.

"It took me about 10 years to be able to write about it," Benincasa said. Now in her (very) early 30's, Benincasa went back to school, ultimately ending up with a Masters in Education from Columbia University.

Signed copies of Agorafabulous! are available at your East Hampton store. You can also catch Benincasa on her You Tube channel, where her Sarah Palin impersonation has been a BookHampton staff favorite.