Who Am I, After All?

Jun 18, 2025

Sometimes, inspiration comes to me from strange sources: a fragment I read—or sometimes write—without knowing that its push and pull is inside me all along. Or the confusing beauty of a more natural sort, like the magnificent goldfinches outside my window, as they fight in a flurry of yellow over ownership of the last perch.

People often ask what I do for a living—especially over a plate of roast beef at dinner parties, when I admit that I am an author. Generally, they are not readers of my work. When they learn that my mother was a Pulitzer-Prize winning poet and sometimes even recognize her name, they are surprised to learn that I write professionally, too. Then they ask if I “do poetry,” and when I answer “No. All nine of my books are either fiction and memoir,” they look surprised.

I am hard put to explain exactly why this is so—as it feels too personal to reveal. I’m not sure I want to talk about it, but there the question sits, and I pause trying to speak the truth, despite my initial hesitation.

I have always been too afraid of the comparison that will inevitably arise, as that conversation always then turns to my mother’s fame and success. Nevertheless, comparisons like these do rain down on my head and on my soul. I so much wish I knew how to avoid them: there have been critics from the New York Times “Book Review,” declaring that my mother was far better than I at commanding power over language, or—worse—that my writing is filled with “purple prose.” Once Mom cautioned me: “Never be a writer, Linda, because I will follow you around like an old gray ghost.” Perhaps she has and it is true. Still, I don’t regret the choice I made when I set my first words down on the first page of my first novel, because she also said: “Linda, tell it true. Tell the whole truth.”

How difficult it has always been to declare myself a writer at all—yet there have been nine books on which my name appears as the author. Over two hundred or so of my “Linda’s Letters,” and a number of essays in Substack now. I’ve occasionally been featured In magazines or newspaper articles, and I’ve had the good luck to be assigned book reviews, as well. Searching for Mercy Street was deemed a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a Notable Book of the Year. But far more important are the readers who send me notes saying that what I’ve written has “changed"—or even “saved”—their lives. Their words are my true reward.

One day I clicked on an email from a stranger named Benjamin B., sometime after I had published a newsletter essay for “Linda’s Letters” about writing my first memoir, Searching for Mercy Street. He said that he appreciated the forgiveness I’d expressed toward my mother there—and that it was startling to him that I had written the book at all. His voice was a whisper in my ear, but I listened nonetheless. However, he expressed his doubt that I could have had any reservations about whether I had, in fact, command of the English language. Surely this could not be true, he said.

He wanted me to understand that despite my mother’s success and fame, both of which had hung me up for years, I was indeed a writer—perhaps even a poet of sorts. For over two decades, I have kept his email on my desktop computer, with his name as the author upon it. Even in my darkest moments, I could see that at least he understood what I was trying to do.

To my surprise, in addition to this email he had taken the courage to send, were two short poems—not his own words, but mine—using several consecutive lines from my first memoir. It was the first time I had seen anything written by me in the form of a poem since I was a teenager, working by my mother’s side.

Benjamin B. had broken some of my prose from Searching For Mercy Street into two different poems and told me that, despite my convictions that I was not a poet, at least the possibility existed within me—replete with imagery, cadence, format and the sound of the word. He was offering me, in this way, two of my own “poems” as proof. He could hear the poetry pushing through my prose, even though I would not have been able to see it that way previously. The mastery of the genre doesn’t really matter, he insisted; what matters is the cool water of imagination that feeds the warmer lake lying above it.

I am grateful that my mother passed along the love of both poetry and prose to me. Did she succeed in making me a poet? I don’t think so, though I am proud of Benjamin B’s attempt to turn one into the other. However, I am grateful that my “old gray ghost” did indeed try to give me such an appreciation. And perhaps, even in this version of “Linda’s Letters,” something new was pushing me to find my own sort of poetry, with the metaphor and the rhythm of language that have always guided me onward. Does it really matter what I call myself?

So, thank you, Benjamin B—for opening my mind and showing me all that I didn’t know was percolating inside me. I offer both “poems” to you, my readers, and ask not for the scour of your judgement, but for your simple appreciation instead. This is everything I have to give. Whether poetry or prose, I hope it is enough.