It is Sylvia Plath’s birthday. I have had a lifelong relationship with her (and will continue to do so). If you click the Sylvia Plath tag below, there is a lot more stuff I’ve written.
But today I wanted to highlight something I’ve linked to before. My friend Cara Ellison, a newlywed and a novelist, blogger and Enron expert as well as crazed cupcake baker, is also a Plath obsessive and wrote the following piece, which is part international thriller, part detective story, part Plath tribute, starring me, Cara and our friend Tracey. Quotes from Plath are woven throughout.
This is really only meant for Sylvia Plath obsessives. This is not Sylvia Plath 101. It requires context, and if you haven’t done the legwork, like we have, you won’t get it.
But to anyone who really gets the Plath thing, who has read her all their lives, her poems and letters and journals, who follows the continuing Plath story, who is familiar with the Plath estate and its issues, who is familiar with the role of Ted Hughes as editor, who is familiar with the controversial editing of her journals, who has “Sylvia Plath” on Google Alert just to keep up to date with everything that continues to happen, and who will understand the import of what the three international detectives actually find in that dusty corner …
I present to you:
That was wonderful, and the comments between you and Cara were edifying. Don’t know why I hadn’t visited it before. I did experience an odd combination of relief and disappointment that no men were eaten like air.
// relief and disappointment//
Haha. Maybe there will be a Part 2.
It struck me today that the “..if you want to know” in Daddy sounds like Holden Caulfield.
Never thought of that before!
None of my friends have ever written fiction in which we speak in Sylvia Plath’s poems, and I am poorer for it.
hahahaha. Maybe you could start a trend!