The Los Angeles Times Insults Iconic Poet Sharon Olds

This essay discusses accusations of sexual assault.

In early August of last year, I was shocked to recognize a name in a headline in the Los Angeles Times: “‘NCIS’ actor Gabriel Olds charged with 7 felony sexual assault counts amid LAPD investigation.”

I met Gabriel Olds in the spring of 2009, when I was personal assistant to his mother, the poet Sharon Olds, during the last term of my MFA at New York University. Once a week, I took the train uptown and walked to the apartment on Riverside Drive where she had lived for decades, the home where had raised her two children with her ex-husband.

The first time I went to Sharon’s apartment, she explained to me that if I was followed, or felt in danger in any way, I should say my whole name into the buzzer. This would be our code, she told me; if I said “It’s Lisa Locascio,” she would know I needed help. Otherwise I was just Lisa, and she was just Sharon.

I was twenty-four, freshly out of a long relationship, suffering experiments with casual dating. Life felt exciting and hard. It was bright and cold outside and dark and warm inside. I sat at Sharon’s table, blinking with awe and dislocation, while she carefully made me a large cup of coffee and brought it to me brimming. Even to a nobody like me, Sharon was kind and interested. I felt a vague jealousy towards the children in her life, for whom I helped her purchase Vera Bradley zippered totes.

The job was easy. I wrote emails, helped Sharon with small tasks. Once I walked her Tumi roller carryon all the way across Central Park, from the west side to the east side, to drop off at the shop to be be repaired. Sharon offered to pay for a cab. But if I had taken a cab, I wouldn’t have that beautiful cold-day errand as a my memory. Ice under the wheels of the suitcase, a long talk with my mom on the phone.

Sharon’s apartment was a warren of warm rooms, only a few of which I ever saw. I handled some of the spiral-bound notebooks in which she did her writing. I looked at her drawings and at the mysterious and huge work of art above her couch. Once, maybe twice, I said hello to her son, who was visiting. He was handsome and smiled at me. Sharon told me he was an actor. I looked him up on IMDB and realized I had watched his episode of SVU with my mom, back in high school.

When I learned that Gabriel Olds had been arrested, I was immediately concerned for Sharon. I last saw her in 2019, when she served as the keynote at the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. She had traveled without a car, and my partner and I drove her everywhere for four days. On our last night together, we drank white wine with a few writers from the conference in the absolutely wrecked living room of our dark cabin, listening to Sharon hold forth on her read of the current season of The Bachelorette, sneaking glances at each other. Was this really happening? Was the author of “I Go Back To May 1937” really opining about how that season’s heroine had been too “sated” by her exertions with one suitor the night before to properly receive another man’s affections the next day in my cruddy little house?

Before that, I hadn’t seen Sharon since our last encounter in New York in 2009, just before my graduation. Although I was never her student, Sharon read my MFA thesis—a novel— in its entirety. She told me that it was “Like Jane Austen, and also not, in wonderful and curious ways.”

After I learned of Gabriel Olds’s arrest, I reread Sharon’s poem “Prayer During A Time My Son Is Having Seizures”, which ends:

Not knowing what to do, how to help, I wrote her an email telling her I loved her, sent it off into the void.

Last year, the articles about Gabriel Olds did not mention Sharon. But on Tuesday of this week, the Times published another story about Gabriel Olds, this one by Harriet Ryan, one of three reporters who collectively won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for their coverage of George Tyndall, the gynecologist who sexually assaulted hundreds of women at the University of Southern California during his nearly thirty years there. Although I didn’t previously know her name, before this week, you could have accurately called me a fan of Ryan; I was a great admirer of her reporting on Tyndall and USC’s complicity in his reign of terror.

This week’s article attempts to provide a broader context for Gabriel Olds’s arrest. It is also the first I’ve seen that identifies Sharon Olds as Gabriel Olds’s mother. It’s paywalled, so here’s a PDF.

The ostensible purpose of the article is to explore the defense Gabriel Olds has mounted. It’s a grab bag of prurient details cherry-picked from the statements given by women who describe consensual kink relationships with Gabriel Olds, and rhetorical flourishes like “Olds’ defense is that his accusers asked him to choke them. If that sounds crazy, you’re probably old, or have been married for a long time.” (Zing!) The article also has an odd carceral enthusiasm, with not one but two arty portraits of the lead detective on the case (I guess they set up a little photo shoot) and an undisguised enthusiasm for the poor conditions in the prison where Olds is held: “In Men’s Central Jail, Olds does not have reliable access to the internet or even a pen. He spends his days writing screenplays with a pencil he sharpens with his teeth.”

Perhaps all of that is normal for a piece about a person accused of violent crimes against many women, whether or not it should be. What led me to write about this article is the disgust and rage I feel at the piece’s treatment of the iconic poet Sharon Olds (like Harriet Ryan, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize) bears in a section of the article that is—coincidentally, I’m sure—illustrated with a still from a TV movie Gabriel Olds made in which he plays the son of notorious murderer and con woman Sante Kimes.

The implication is unsubtle: with her “confessional” “sex” poetry, a category into which Ryan sorts a poem about a first-grader peeing after a long car ride, Sharon Olds bears some culpability for her son’s alleged crimes. Gone are the accolades, the years of work with students, the ordinary domestic joys and sorrows described exactly in decades of work. In Ryan’s telling, Gabriel Olds’s mother is a tawdry figure fit to be played by a bewigged Mary Tyler Moore in a late-career stab at dramatic credibility.

Here is Sharon Olds’s biography from the NYU MFA website, and a list of the honors Olds has received.

Reading the Times article, I remembered something Sharon told me when I worked for her.

“I was very pregnant when I defended my Ph.D. dissertation, to a roomful of men. They made me revise it before they would pass me, because I had done the footnotes incorrectly—I’d written it like poetry. The men were looking at each other, laughing. How long should we give her, one asked. Oh, how about nine months? Another one said. Yeah, they all said, yeah—that’s right, nine months, while they stared at my body and laughed at me.”

“That’s terrible,” I said, twenty-four years old, with no idea.

“Oh yes,” Sharon said, “oh yes. But you know what, Lisa? I wish I’d written down every offer I’ve ever gotten to take another job, so I could show NYU and maybe get a better deal—I encourage you to do that. Don’t let yourself be taken advantage of. Don’t think that everyone has these opportunities. Because they don’t!” She paused. “I had them because I worked for them. Because of my poetry.”

“Because of your poetry,” I agreed, thinking, that was how it would be for me, too, except it would be even better, because things were different now, and people didn’t act like that anymore. I would work hard, I would have opportunities, and I would seize them. I would generate a body of work no one could impugn or deny.

Seven years later, on Election Night 2016, I was living alone in Middletown, Connecticut. I had moved there a few months earlier to begin a teaching position, a move that coincided with my separation from my first husband. In the matter of a few weeks, everything in my life had been shaken out of the insidiously unhappy but stable complacency of the last years of my Ph.D. Now I was a visiting professor at a small liberal arts college who had a long-distance new partner with whom I spent hours on the phone each night.

Earlier that day, I had had my portrait taken by a photographer who had donated her time to documenting women in their “pantsuits” on the day we thought Hilary Clinton would become president. I wore an expensive gray wool blazer over a blue jumpsuit and brought a cinnamon broom from Trader Joe’s with me to the shoot, holding it proudly: I’m a witch, and I vote! By the time I received the files a few days later, Trump was president. I’ve never really been able to look at them.

A few weeks earlier, someone had torn out my Hillary lawn sign hours after I timidly displayed it in the only front yard I’ve ever had. Yet I was genuinely shocked when Trump won. I kept my boyfriend on the phone for hours that night, until almost four in the morning, sobbing about how scared I was, predicting cultural deterioration.

“It will become acceptable to mock and malign women,” I told him. “The Overton window will come to include a new level of misogyny. Women will be ousted from their jobs. Abortion will become illegal.”

He reassured me that these things wouldn’t happen. That he would protect me. Eventually I went to sleep.

The years that followed were not as simple a decline narrative as I feared that night. People fought back then, and we are fighting back today, too. But now, eight years later, Trump is President again. I have accepted without in any way really grappling with or processing it that we will probably not see a woman as the leader of this country in my lifetime. Abortion is illegal for many women in this country and imperiled for all of us.

Does it matter that Sharon Olds is a good and kind person who bears no more responsibility for her son’s alleged crimes than his father, or any other person who has been close to any other person in the span of a human life? Does it matter that her poetry changed my life, and maybe yours too, and almost certainly the life of someone you know? Does it matter that Ocean Vuong told the New York Times Magazine in 2022: “Whether you read her or not, if you write about the body’s position against pleasure, and the profound and the profane, you’re writing in the shadow of Sharon Olds.” Do any of those things matter more than, or less than, her credentials laid out as above, in cold hard accomplishments and titles? Does any history matter? Does any life?

Anyone can be described in a sleazy way in a newspaper owned by a billionaire who wants to bend the world to his dark curve, I suppose. Any writer can be put to the task of defaming any person, any poet, even a master of language who knows what what words are, what they can do.

If you, like me, think that Sharon Olds deserves better than a snide character assassination in the Los Angeles Times, I encourage you to send your thoughts to the editor here, or at [email protected]. You can also email Harriet Ryan, the author of the above-described article, at [email protected].

I’d be honored if you shared this newsletter with others who might want to stand up for Sharon and her legacy.

I’ll end with two of my favorites of Sharon’s poems: “Aria Conceived In Mexico,” the last poem I read my mother in her hospital bed, and “The Language of the Brag,” which I clutched like a diploma after my child was born two and a half years later.

Thank you for reading. Stay safe, everyone, and rest well.