Q: Describe the family that Eleanor was born into.
A: My grandmother was born into a family of privilege. There's no doubt about
that. Everybody's role was absolutely laid out in stone, and expectations were very clear.
People knew what they were supposed to wear, what they were supposed to do, what they were
supposed to talk about, what they weren't supposed to talk about, what they were going to be
when they grew up. I mean, little girls became social butterflies, became mothers and ran a
household and continued in a very social kind of a lifestyle. Most of the people in that class
had access to wealth and to all of the comforts that others in this country at that time didn't
have. They were a very elite group of people in their own way. And so my grandmother started
her life on a path that wasn't meant to have any deviation whatsoever.
Q: Do you think she escaped from the difficulty of her life in her books?
A: After the death of her parents, she went to live with her grandmother
in Tivoli. Her grandmother had several other children who were young adults, very busy,
very social, and in a sense, a handful. So my great-grandmother, I believe, didn't have a
lot of time to suddenly devote to two small grandchildren. So I believe, and from the stories
I've heard, that my grandmother's life at Tivoli was somewhat isolated and lonely. And I know
that as a child, she found great solace in reading, because even she would tell me when I was
growing up that reading could bring you lots of friends that you didn't have. And she even signed
me up in a book club when I was quite young, and it continued until into my teenage years, because
books had been so important as friends to her, that she was imparting that to me as a grandchild
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