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.”
Since Satan Says, Olds has published twelve collections of poems, richly imagined elevations of ordinary experience: childhood punishments, being in love, sex, watching television, sitting on the toilet, parenting and the deaths of parents, and the realities of aging. These books include The Dead and the Living (1984), which has sold more than fifty thousand copies; The Father (1992), which Olds described to me as “what I was born to write”; and Stag’s Leap (2012), which won the Pulitzer and T. S. Eliot prizes and was inspired by the sudden end of her thirty-two-year marriage. Some of the most moving poems in her latest collection, Balladz (2022), a finalist for the National Book Award, are elegies she composed during the illness and after the death, in 2020, of Carl Wallman, her partner since 2006. Some readers are turned off by Olds’s sexual frankness, her tell-all emotional directness, and her tendency to return repeatedly to heightened moments of pleasure or pain. But the power of her work lies in its devastating honesty—its willingness to risk, and thereby transcend, sentimentality.
Our conversations took place over three afternoons in November, beginning just before Olds’s eightieth birthday. We sat at her desk in her top-floor office at NYU, where she has taught since 1984. She was at home there, speaking fondly of the students downstairs and of her friend Terrance Hayes next door. Among the books on her shelves were issues of the journals and magazines in which she’s published poems over the years, some of which she took down and read from aloud. She wore rimless glasses and no makeup, her long gray-white hair held back by black clips, and spoke with excitable warmth, in a playful mixture of digression, discretion, and a candor that she dialed back somewhat in her edits to the interview printed here. During our time together, we ate Domino’s Pizza, butterscotch-and Bordeaux-flavored truffles, and half-crushed doughnuts from Dream Fluff, her childhood favorite, which I’d brought with me from Berkeley. On our second meeting, after Olds’s assistant, Margaret Wright, took our lunch orders—a KIND Bar for her, a turkey sandwich for me—Olds expressed her approval for my preferred mayonnaise. “You wouldn’t want to get the wrong taste from mayonnaise,” she said. “Even organic Hellmann’s is horrible, horrible.” I agreed that it wasn’t the same. “Like poison,” she added.
SHARON OLDS
I woke up happy this morning. I decided what I would say tonight.
INTERVIEWER
At the National Book Awards?
OLDS
At the reading for the finalists. I’m going to say, “I woke up this morning understanding what this all is. It’s a struggle for the human right to read and to write. We are a radical community”—I’m planning to laugh—“fighting for the honor of reading what we want to read and writing what we want to write.” That’s it. A little toadying. But I’m a little toady.
INTERVIEWER
Toady?
OLDS
I want to diffuse any hostility toward me. I wanted to do that in my family. If I think about it now, it often worked.
INTERVIEWER
What was it like to grow up in your family?
OLDS
I was born in ’42, to a financially comfortable WASP family. People who thought they were classy. They never bragged about it in an open way, but it seemed a moral center of their universe—not church but being better than other people. It was obvious to me that they weren’t! The repression of this particular WASP family was very strong. To change the expression on one’s face could be a sin or a danger. I learned as a child how to lie. I’ll say anything to someone crying in an airport.
INTERVIEWER
Do you lie in your poems?
OLDS
I am avoiding that question because when we’re talking about my life and then you say the phrase “your poems,” I get mixed up.
INTERVIEWER
But part of what I want to talk about is the relationship between your poems and your life, because they don’t seem to be so different. Why is it important to you to keep them separate?
OLDS
So I can
