Mary Oliver was reserved about the abuse she’d suffered as a child. She acknowledged it without allowing herself, her conversation or her interviewers to stay there.
In her essay “Staying Alive,” she said this:
And you must not, ever give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
I don’t mean it’s easy or assured; there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, and bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet.
But she talked of two things that called to her: “the summoning world,” the wonderful things in nature that are more interesting than one’s own anger and bitterness, and “the thing that one does,” in her case the making of poems. She said that
having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.
I’d say that essay was her autobiography.
• Sources and notes: Mary Oliver, Upstream; New York: Penguin Press, 2016. The essay “Staying Alive” is on pp. 13-22. The quotations are on pp. 19-20.
In May 2017, Penguin Press announced that it had acquired an untitled biography of Mary Oliver by Lindsay Whalen. When Oliver died, Whalen wrote a moving article: “How Mary Oliver’s Biographer Finally Met the Legendary Poet”; Vulture, Jan. 18, 2019. A note said the biography was forthcoming. But that’s the last I’ve heard of it.
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