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love her. The face in the mirror is myself.
    And the face in the mirror is you.

P ART ONE
    Letters from a Marriage

PART I:
    INTRODUCTORY NOTE
    Women are only now discovering how many great literary treasures of our history lie buried—in diaries, journals, letters sent and unsent, folk songs and lullabies never written down, poetry scribbled on the flyleaves of old pioneer-family Bibles and recipe books, aphorisms scratched on the walls of prisons and asylums, published volumes whose authorship was attributed to husbands and fathers and brothers and lovers, meditations written around the margins of cloister prayer books, unforgettable tales woven by the grandmother who never learned to read or write. For each woman of genius who was permitted minimally to consider herself a writer, to publish, to be acknowledged (albeit patronizingly), and to pay the enormous and at times even fatal price for this privilege—for each of those desperate and intrepid few, there were literally thousands of others who went to their graves unheard and unacknowledged. “Anonymous” herself, it would appear, was most frequently a woman, forced into secret writing when she could not be silenced altogether .
    Although I have wanted consciously to be a writer from the age of four, and although I have worked seriously at my craft from the age of fourteen and published professionally from the age of seventeen, I too have written an entire body of work “in secret”—so strong is the message of female literary history. I don’t mean that work which I wrote with an eye to publication but which simply has not been published. I mean, rather, other work, including the letters in this section of Going Too Far.
    â€œ Letters from a Marriage” were written on the dates they bear, to myself or my child, and mostly to my husband. They were almost all written before any feminist consciousness had touched my life, although in my ongoing fight for equal treatment I had fallen into the trap of thinking I must be an “exceptional woman” to be taken seriously. When my attempts to live up to such an image still didn’t produce the desired result, I thought I was at fault, or perhaps (rarely) the individual man or situation was to blame—but I always saw theproblem as unique, not universal or political. And I was in continual psychic pain about this: I had grown so used to that pain, in fact, that it seemed an integral part of myself .
    These letters span a period of eleven years. I was twenty-one years old when I wrote the first one, thirty-two when I wrote the last. The first was written before I was married, the last when my child was four years old. The bulk of the letters, those to my husband, Kenneth Pitchford, herein referred to as “K.,” were written out of those thoughts and feelings I feared I could never actually speak aloud to him. I thought of them as diary leaves—written mostly for my own sake, with the remote possibility of someday perhaps being able to show them to him. Beyond that, I admit that I secretly hoped the letters would be found after my death, and then could be seen by the whole world, should it care. I confess this last because to do otherwise would be hypocritical; the driving, voracious, irrepressible, and brazen desire of a writer is, after all, to write, and yes, to be read .
    As becomes evident in the later letters, I did eventually let K. read them, and that reading opened up new channels in our relationship. Publishing them is another step altogether. They are, to say the least, embarrassing. They reveal both pleasant and unpleasant truths about myself, K., and our marriage, which inclinations toward complacency would rather leave unsaid, or at least unprinted. I know that there will be those who will be surprised that we remain together; those men who will wonder why K. never left me, and those women who, from a superficially “correct” feminist position,