On the first day of school in the fall of 1972, Tammy Snodgrass stood up for show-and-tell in her green and tan plaid gauchos, white cotton turtleneck, and single blond side pony-tail, and smugly announced, “This summer my dad went to Germany for the Olympics and saw Mark Spitz win seven gold medals.” As proof, she held up a photograph so grainy and blurry it could have depicted a German male stripper with her father.
My dad had not been watching sexy mustachioed swimmers in Munich that summer, because he had been committed to McLean, the private psychiatric hospital just outside Boston, for alcoholism. My mother was a poet, so when she spoke of McLean it was with reverence, even awe. Both Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath had stayed there. Read more about Tammy Snodgrass.>>