Your Story, My Story

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.

Connie Palmen was born in Sint Odiliënberg, the Netherlands, and studied literature and philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of The Laws, voted the European Novel of the Year and short-listed for the 1996 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; The Friendship, winner of the AKO Literature Prize; Lucifer; and the autobiographical novel I.M. Ms. Palmen currently lives in Amsterdam. For more information, please visit www.conniepalmen.nl.

Eileen Stevens earned her MA in linguistics with a specialization in translation from the University of Amsterdam. Her Dutch-to-English translations include Karin Schacknat’s In and Out of Fashion and Vera Mertens’s The Concentration Camp. She is a co-translator of Ineke van Doorn’s Singing from the Inside Out. A New Jersey native, Eileen worked as a professional violinist for twenty-five years before devoting herself to literary translation. She lives in Amsterdam. For more information, visit www.keyboardtranslations.com.

Anna Asbury studied classics and linguistics at Cambridge University before moving to the Netherlands for a PhD at Utrecht University. Her translations include Paul De Grauwe’s The Limits of the Market and Bastiaan Rijpkema’s Militant Democracy: The Limits of Democratic Tolerance. She is a co-translator of Koen Vossen’s The Power of Populism and Fréderike Geerdink’s The Boys Are Dead. She lives in Cambridge, UK. For more information, please visit www.annaasbury.com.