First published 2019
Elizabeth Hardwick opens her letters to find Robert Lowell has left their twenty-one-year marriage for another woman. The pages that follow capture seven years of correspondence between two acclaimed writers navigating personal devastation and creative breakthrough. Hardwick writes from New York while Lowell moves between London and his new life with Caroline Blackwood. Their letters reveal the raw mechanics of a literary marriage falling apart and slowly rebuilding itself. Friends like Elizabeth Bishop and Mary McCarthy witness the damage as Lowell transforms Hardwick's private words into his controversial sonnet sequence The Dolphin. Hardwick responds by channeling her pain into Sleepless Nights and her essays on women in literature. Their exchanges become a battlefield over artistic ethics and personal loyalty. Bishop warns Lowell that art isn't worth the human cost, but he publishes anyway. Through separation, anger, and unexpected reconciliation, both writers discover what remains when love and ambition collide.
Genres: literary-criticism, literary-fiction, 20th-century, biography-memoir
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, found-family
Setting: New York, London
Period: 1970-1979
562 pages · Kindle Edition · Farrar, Straus and Giroux