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will have only contempt for me, for not having left him. Some readers will be voyeurs and some will be judges. There will even be some, perhaps, who disbelieve the validity of the letters; who will insist that I wrote them all recently, specifically for publication in this book, as some sort of gimmick .
    One cannot require that the world understand one’s actions. One can only try to proceed honorably, and to explain those actions one feels it necessary to clarify. The letters are real, and were written at the time of their dates. I publish them now because I feel they are an important part of my life, and because I am convinced that they name truths, trace patterns, and expose attitudes which in one way or another every woman who has ever lived under patriarchy has experienced .
    The sharing of that experience is at the heart of the feminist metamorphosis—and for every reader who willfully misunderstands the letters there will be more women who will recognize this voice as their own. That would be sufficient reason for making myself vulnerable. Indeed, it is merely a measure of residual patriarchal identification in me that I still feel embarrassed about this at all. But such are the ironies inherent in the process .
    â€œ Love is more complex than theory,” I wrote once in a poem. The letters are ultimately about love, in its various and terrifying and life-sustaining forms—and about the griefs that accompany it, today, for a woman, although I could at the time of writing most of them give no name yet to those griefs. But I could not know what I know now, however little that is, had I not dared to begin at that point .
    Awkwardly, then, I affirm these letters, claim them for my own, and send them forth on their own. And I affirm the woman who wrote them, the man who finally read them and later courageously supported the idea of their publication, and the relationship which so far has endured and which continues to pay the costly price of growth .
    The personal is political, I know as a feminist. The personal is also the pure ore to be mined for literature, I know as an artist. There is no way, then, that I cannot dare publish these letters .

1
    The first letter in this series is both naïve and prophetic; it was written to myself one week before I married Kenneth Pitchford. He and I had met almost four years earlier, when I was seventeen; we met through a poetry anthology in which we each were represented by some poems. The relationship deepened and intensified during the following years, when we formed a poetry workshop together. There are references in this letter to various friends’ and relatives’ opposition to our marriage; indeed, my mother was greatly upset, as were most close family friends. Surprisingly, most of K.’s friends—a supposedly less conventionally minded circle of artists—were also opposed. Hardly anyone saw much of a future for such a couple: the man a poet and an unashamed homosexual (this, years before Gay Liberation), the woman a virginal former child actress ten years his junior who claimed she wanted to be a writer. 1 Such a marriage, buzzed the consensus, in traditional, or Freudian, or even bohemian terms, was going too far.
    12 September 1962
    S O I AM , after all, going to marry K. And for my own benefit, I want to put into words below what that—and the very living of my life entirely, which only really begins now—will entail:
    I will learn to love him even as he loves me, from knowledge and not abstraction. I will use him to find more of myself, and be at his hand for the same purpose. I will not lie to him, or deceive him, no matter what the cost. I will insist on mutual honesty between us, whatever it discloses. I will not be subject to his life or work, be beset upon by him or any other; neither will I ask that of him. I will assert my selfness, my work, my desires and hours, not at the cost of his but to bring about between us a