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A Writer's Jottings
 
 

Sylvia Plath: The Personal is Poetic

I didn't know there was more to learn about Sylvia Plath until I began reading Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Life of Sylvia Plath. In more than a thousand pages, biographer Heather Clark gives us a compelling picture of a gifted young woman's struggle to write during the 1950s and early 1960s.

 

Among much else, we see the way a poet and novelist creates art from life, erasing the line between fiction and non-fiction. Her poetry evolved from formal to fierce during her twenties, when she expressed brutal truths. Did she have the right to do it?


It's a question many writers grapple with. When I write in the first person, my desire to be kind or honest often conflicts.  I either censor myself or express criticism, but usually one feels too cowardly and the other too cruel before I find the right combination of words to express myself in a genuine way.

 

A month after the publication of Plath's novel, The Bell Jar, which had a satirical portrayal of her devoted mother, the author committed suicide at the age of thirty. Many stresses drove her over the edge, when she was estranged from her husband, Ted Hughes, and living alone with her small children. It was a few weeks before The Feminine Mystique was published. If she had lived a little longer, it might have saved her.

 

With warm wishes,
Laurie 

 

~~~~~~~

 

News About My Books 

 

July 21st: Newport Art Museum, Newport, Rhode Island, online talk about Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe to the museum's book group in conjunction with an O'Keeffe exhibition there.

 

August 1st: A wide-ranging interview about my writing life will be aired in a podcast by Main Street Moxie. I talk about the nerve it took to write Portrait of an Artist. 

 

August 5th: 5:30 to 7:30 pm: I'll be signing copies of Word for Word: A Writer's Life at the Sharon Summer Book Signing. The gala event held under tents will be behind the Sharon Historical Society next to the library on Upper Main Street in Sharon, Connecticut.

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