As I admitted a couple of months ago, I have never read nor had any interest in reading anything by Syliva Plath. I thought she was just some big depressed writer who wrote poems that were more cliches than anything else and only feminist writers liked her.
I'm not proud of myself, but at least I'm honest.
After reading Donna Seaman's interview with Kate Moses in her wonderful collection Wrtiers on the Air, I couldn't resist Moses's novel Wintering, and I fell hard for that book - incredibly hard. I loved it. I haven't read Plath's poetry collection Ariel yet (Wintering is based on the order of poems that Plath wanted for Ariel and not the order that her husband Ted Hughes set for the book after her death) but I did pick up a copy of The Bell Jar and finished it last night and I am now officially converted to the Church of Sylvia.
She's got me man; she's got me in a major way.
The thing about Bell Jar that really impressed me was how well Sylvia was in touch with her inner college student. Clearly she was still deeply in touch with the choices she made in high school and college, and the emotions that surrounded her breakdown. But there are also so many wonderful passages of writing like this:
"It wasn't the nice kind of rain that rinses you clean, but the sort of rain I imagine they must have in Brazil. It flew straight down from the sky in drops the size of coffee saucers and hit the hot sidewalks with a hiss that sent clouds of steam writhing up from the gleaming, dark concrete."
We all could stand to do some writing like that.
I don't know why I've dodged sylvia all these years or what the heck I was thinking. There so much more to her book then what I expected, so much insight into a life too tightly wound and a family that was far too screwed up to save her (or notice what was happening). I thought it was well done as I started reading but the further I got into it, and the more main character Esther Greenwood's life fell apart, the more compelling the novel became. I wish I knew that the ending after the book was better for Sylvia - Esther - but still, the combination of Bell Jar and Wintering shows how fragile we all are.
Plath is the first author I got from Donna Seaman but she won't be the last. I'm going to work my way through this book, through all of the authors she interviewed, and see what else I find. My personal discovery of Sylvia Plath is completely due to Seaman and Moses. I'll keep you posted on what Donna's book shows me next.
