Sandra Hochman was 25 when she received a journalism assignment that changed her life: interview Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Lowell. She called him to set a time to speak and he suggested they meet immediately at the Russian Tea Room in New York. There, he confessed he had just left his wife. Many martinis later, they began a heady and disorienting affair with more heat than city asphalt baking in the sun.
Hochman, whose 1973 documentary Year of the Woman featuring Warren Beatty, Shirley MacLaine, Gloria Steinem, and Nora Ephron has new relevance, was part of a literary crowd that included Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, and Philip Roth. She revered Lowell, having studied him at Bennington College, then carrying Lord Weary’s Castle around Paris while her own marriage dissolved. That Lowell was 43 was no matter: to Hochman, he was a handsome genius, a Boston Brahmin, whose waspy presence she was delighted to luxuriate in. They took immense pleasure in reading and critiquing each other’s work, promising to spend the rest of their lives together. Both poets sought to break away from the customs of their rigid families, finding acceptance and understanding for a blissful time with each other.
The first new work from Hochman in forty years, her memoir LOVING ROBERT LOWELL (July 2017; Turner Publishing) is about the passions that flare within us and the secrets that undo us. It’s a story about what happens when our best face, the one we put on for new friends and lovers, disappears in a flash.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sandra Hochman is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet with six volumes of poetry. She also authored two nonfiction books and directed a 1973 documentary, Year of the Woman, currently enjoying a renaissance. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, and she was a columnist for Harper’s Bazaar.