Ted Hughes and Lucas Myers met at Cambridge University in January 1955. They maintained a close friendship until Hughes’ death on 22 October 1988. Myers was also a friend of Sylvia Plath and various other family members. His memoir draws on his forty-year correspondence with Hughes and discusses Birthday Letters, the Poet Laureate’s collection of poems about Sylvia Plath and their marriage, and Plath’s recently published Journals, 1950-1962.