It’s been a few years since I fell into a Sylvia Plath-themed rabbit hole, but ever since, I’ve been mystified by everything having to do with the poet. Whether or not you’re intimately acquainted with her craft or her life story, it’s still pretty well-known that her untimely demise came in the form of suicide. Though she struggled with depression most of her life and had previously attempted to end her life, passionate followers of hers were quick to point fingers at her equally talented husband, Ted Hughes.
In Connie Palmen’s Your Story, My Story, translated by Eileen Stevens and Anna Asbury, Palmen plays devil’s advocate by invoking the voice of Hughes himself to tell his side of the story. Followers of the poets’ story will be pleased to find many familiar anecdotes broken down into poetic detail. From that first meeting at a party in Cambridge, when Sylvia bites his cheek, to their short, four-month courtship ending in a hush-hush wedding at which only her mother was present, to their multiple rejections and multiple publications, to moving back and forth across the Atlantic, to the moment Aissa Wevill steps into their lives, disrupting a marriage already hanging on its last thread, setting into motion a torrent of events that will secure Plath’s literary immortality and Hughes’ defiled persona.
“Memory is literary by nature. It takes factual events and gives them a metaphorical charge, lending what really happened a symbolic weight, persistently in search of the security of a story.”― Connie Palmen, Your Story, My Story
Your Story, My Story is dark and at every moment filled with irony as Palmen tells the story through Hughes’ hindsight, depicting instances of their life together when it seemed their destiny had already been marked.
Fans of the two poets will find much to debate about as many have claimed Hughes’ affair with Wevill as the catalyst that propelled Plath to take her own life. Through Palmen’s narrative, told from Hughes’ perspective, we begin to wonder if there was really anything that could’ve been done to stop the chain of events. Plath moved through undulating moods, at every moment in love with life while simultaneously, at every moment, loathing it. Palmen’s aim is not to prompt the reader to choose a side, but simply to give a voice to Hughes, that he may explain how for years he tried to do right by Plath, to hold together a relationship that was perhaps doomed from the start, where, far more than the volume of their combined talent, Plath’s struggles with her mental illness always took center stage. Palmen instead pushes us to ask ourselves: What would we have done in Hughes’ place?
Your Story, My Story will hopefully enlighten fans on both sides of the tragic tale, bringing some much-needed balance to a story that for decades has been told mainly from just one side.