Your Story, My Story

I'm excited to be participating in the book tour for Your Story, My Story by Connie Palmen! Thanks to Amazon Publishing and Over the River PR you can win a copy for yourself! (Head over to Instagram to enter).

I’ll admit to not knowing all that much about Silvia Plath’s personal life, beyond the bare basics, before reading this book. However, now I’m hooked and am trying to learn as much as I can about her short and volatile life.

Your Story, My Story is told from the poet Ted Hughes’ point of view, describing their meeting, love affair, marriage, and life after Plath’s suicide. Usually, when we hear about Silvia Plath, Ted is blamed (at least in part) for exacerbating her depression and ultimately her death so it’s interesting to hear about it from his perspective, and think about how it must feel to have strangers talking and writing about your relationship as if they had some ownership of it.

This book is beautifully written, but it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. Their relationship is sometimes as violent as it is beautiful and many of their interactions made me quite uncomfortable while others left me emotional and raw. Let’s just say the highs are high and the lows are very low. The writing itself is poetic in the extreme, and I find myself wanting to get my hands on some of Hughes’ work—I’ll admit that while I’ve read some of Plath’s work I’ve never read any of his.

While this work was originally written in Dutch (a language I unfortunately don’t read) I thought the translation was incredibly well done. Despite being only 186 pages, this is not a book you’ll rush through, instead, you’ll want to spend time with it, savor it, and then read it all over again.

Trigger warnings for physical abuse, mental illness, suicide and infidelity.

SYNOPSIS:

From the award-winning author of The Friendship comes a shattering, brilliantly inventive novel based on the volatile true love story of literary icons Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

In 1963 Sylvia Plath took her own life in her London flat. Her death was the culmination of a brief, brilliant life lived in the shadow of clinical depression—a condition exacerbated by her tempestuous relationship with mercurial poet Ted Hughes. The ensuing years saw Plath rise to martyr status while Hughes was cast as the cause of her suicide, his infidelity at the heart of her demise.

For decades, Hughes never bore witness to the truth of their marriage—one buried beneath a mudslide of apocryphal stories, gossip, sensationalism, and myth. Until now. In this mesmerizing fictional work, Connie Palmen tells his side of the story, previously untold, delivered in Ted Hughes’s own uncompromising voice.

A brutal and lyrical confessional, Your Story, My Story paints an indelible picture of their seven-year relationship—the soaring highs and profound lows of star-crossed soul mates bedeviled by their personal demons. It will forever change the way we think about these two literary icons.