This indeli­ble romance begins with a dar­ing con­ceit — that the author’s grand­fa­ther may have had an affair with Lucille Ball. Strauss offers a fresh view of a celebri­ty Amer­i­ca loved more than any oth­er. Lucille Ball — the most pow­er­ful woman in the his­to­ry of Hol­ly­wood — starred in Amer­i­ca’s first big-time inter­ra­cial mar­riage. She owned more movie sets than did any movie stu­dio. And she more or less sin­gle-hand­ed­ly cre­at­ed the mod­ern TV busi­ness. And yet, Lucille’s off-cam­era life was in dis­ar­ray. While act­ing out a hap­py mar­riage for mil­lions, in pri­vate she suf­fered. Her part­ner could­n’t stay faith­ful. She strug­gled to man­age her fame with the demands of being a moth­er, a cre­ative genius, an entre­pre­neur, and most of all, a sym­bol. The Queen of Tues­day—Strauss’s fol­low-up to the NBCC-win­ning Half a Life—mix­es fact and fic­tion, mem­oir and nov­el, to imag­ine the provoca­tive sto­ry of a woman we thought we knew.