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Letters to the Mother

Elena del Rivero

Issue 140, Fall 1996

 

 

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More from Issue 140, Fall 1996

Buy this issue!

  • Fiction

    • Laurel Anne Berger

      The Storks

    • Rhidian Brook

      A Real Disaster

    • Robert Olen Butler

      "Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover"

    • Patricia Eakins

      The Garden of Fishes

    • Richard Stern

      Audit

  • Interview

    • Richard Ford

      The Art of Fiction No. 147

    • Amos Oz

      The Art of Fiction No. 148

  • Poetry

    • Sarah Arvio

      Visits from the Seventh

    • Frank Bidart

      The Return

    • Scott Cairns

      Two Poems

    • Alfred Corn

      Philosophy

    • Irving Feldman

      Lives of the Poets

    • Joseph Harrison

      The Cretonnes of Penelope

    • Adriana Szymanska

      Two Poems

    • John Kinsella

      Two Poems

    • Campbell McGrath

      Two Poems

    • Joyce Carol Oates

      Immobility Defense

    • Sharon Olds

      71 B.C.E.

    • Kathleen Peirce

      Three Poems

    • J. S. Renau

      Night Out

    • Pattiann Rogers

      The Art of Raising Gibbons and Flowers

    • Ira Sadoff

      Language

    • Robyn Selman

      1945-1995

    • Patricia Storace

      A Grecian Sword, c. 348 B.C.

  • Feature

    • Bernard Cooper

      Labyrinthine

  • Art

    • Louise Bourgeois

      The View from the Bottom of the Well

    • Elena del Rivero

      Letters to the Mother

    • Cindy Workman

      Issue No. 140 Cover

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By Sharon Olds
 

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From left, Galway Kinnell, Robert Hass, Olds, and Brenda Hillman in the Oakley house at the Community of Writers, Olympic Valley, California, 1989. Courtesy of Sharon Olds and the Community of Writers.

Sharon Olds published her first book, Satan Says, in 1980, at the age of thirty-seven. The book is organized into four sections, “Daughter,” “Woman,” “Mother,” and “Journey,” and it begins with its title poem, whose speaker is locked in a box she can open only by repeating after Satan: “Say shit, say death, say fuck the father.” At the time, Olds—who was born in San Francisco, graduated from Stanford, and received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia—was married to a psychiatrist, and she spent her days on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, caring for their two young children. Not long after the book’s publication, she told me last year, someone who had invited her to give a reading picked her up at the airport and said, “I thought you would look angrier.”

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In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.

Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.

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