A few words before we begin:<\/p>\n
1. Sylvia Plath wrote a journal until the end of her life. A highly edited version was published decades ago, with a foreward by husband Ted Hughes who admitted to destroying the final two years of her journal. This was like a bomb going off, and the reverb has lasted to this day. He has been the focus of much anger because of it. He said that he wanted to protect his children from having to read said journal. So it must have been pretty awful. But the loss to Plath fans is incalculable. I do not blame him for his actions, because he had to have been a wreck, but I do regret the loss. In the last decade, a big publishing event was an “unedited” version of Plath’s journal with additional material – but sadly, those two years were still not included. So. Please don’t insult me by calling them “unedited” then. Thanks. Did Hughes destroy them as he said? Is it possible a copy exists somewhere? Hughes is dead now. Will we ever know? It is something to speculate about (and drool over).<\/p>\n
2. My friend Cara is as huge a Plath fan as I am. We have even considered meeting up together at the Lilly Library to go through Plath’s papers that are held there.<\/p>\n
3. The missing journals are important. Remember how important those journals are to Plath fans, and how much we ache to get our hands on them. How much we believe they do exist somewhere, and how much we long for the day when they are revealed.<\/p>\n
4. Cara has just written a tale on her blog – part spy-novel, part international thriller, part homage to Sylvia Plath – starring me, her, and Tracey<\/a>. One other thing to take note of: Most of the dialogue is direct quotations from Plath’s poems, and the narrative is peppered literally with countless references to Plath’s work. If you are at all familiar with Plath, you’ll recognize some of them.<\/p>\n It is so brilliant what Cara has done here.<\/p>\n Now:<\/p>\n Knowing all of this as a preamble, go read Cara’s explanatory note<\/a>, and then go read the story that my friend Cara has just written<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n