Your Story, My Story

by Connie Palmen

At the lectures she became acquainted with Anne Sexton—an attractive, flamboyant, chain-smoking poetess who, like her, was the daughter of an ambitious, overprotective mother, and also had firsthand experience of suicide. She told me with a hint of jealousy that Sexton had just been released from an insane asylum following her most recent suicide attempt, that for the first time in her life she’d met a woman who was even angrier than she was, and together they were able to have the most delectable discussions about suicide and the death wish. Although Sexton was four years her senior and the mother of two young children, my wife—as was her wont—believed she’d found a doppelgänger, but eventually, her deep-seated mistrust of women won out over her longing for friendship. When she came home one Tuesday ranting about Sexton’s extramarital affair with the poetry editor of a large publishing house, griping that their talks tended to lack erudition, and saying that while she could acknowledge that Sexton’s poems were good, she did find them a little lightweight, I knew she was protecting herself from too great an identification. If she couldn’t absorb another person fully as an alter ego, she closed herself off, became distant and withdrawn, unreachable behind a facade of husband, health, and happiness.