The essay Elizabeth published in Vogue in the summer of 1971 was unusually personal. “The Ties Women Cannot Shake and Have,” begins with a confession about her ever-present anxieties and tendency to worry about all sorts of things.20 As a young woman, she wrote, her worries were centered on “disgrace,” the potential results of her involvements with men (at a time—as she did not feel the need to explain here—when the taint of promiscuity or an out-of-wedlock pregnancy could destroy a woman’s good name). Even marriage to the wrong man could mean not living “the life you wanted.” Then, as a married woman, the birth of her child temporarily made her reluctant to travel. Working on her writing involved “an almost puritanical pressure,” but it was important to pay attention to housework as well, “if that makes someone else happier.” (In reality, as soon as Elizabeth could afford it, she hired other women to do the cleaning.) This shadowy “someone” takes on a greater presence in succeeding paragraphs, where she invokes a poem by Sylvia Plath about children whom “an educated, sophisticated man” has left behind “when he changed his mind.” The woman doesn’t become accustomed to the absence of this man. She is forced into self-reliance, but not by women’s liberation. “The brevity of love must be acknowledged,” Elizabeth concluded. Her self-revelation is heartbreaking.