The Journals of Sylvia Plath by Ted Hughes

Were you the sort of girl who only kept her diary in times of extremes - distress or exhilaration? That was Sylvia Plath, it would seem, and I completely related. In fact, this book was kind of scary in how completely similar it was to the kinds of issues and emotions I scribbled to my confessor-journal as a young girl/woman. Move over Ally McBeal, I think I found everywoman. I'm eager to test my proposition though, and plan to send a copy of Plath's journals to Nette, who's nature is quite different from mine. When we were growing up, for example, she wrote in her journal every day, so she may not identify much at all. In Plath's journals, it was with fascination and happiness that I read and recognized the self-cajoling, self-castigating writings of a young woman testing her wings sexually and socially. The added benefit was reading them in the voice of an able writer, and the occasional jottings of her craft:

Outside the picture window the rain is pouring on the ground
And all the things you ever did or will do wrong are falling
   down without a sound
Out of the yesterday sky
To where all the little stillborn cretins of tomorrow lie.

I can't say enough great things about this book. The further I read, the more pissed I was that her husband Ted Hughes, who writes the foreward, had destroyed the journals she had kept just before her suicide. As she grows up, her thoughts on her writing and her marriage remain relevant and fascinating, and I wish we all didn't have to miss out on her reflections in the last bit of her life. Hughes reasons that he didn't want her children ever to read them... they must have been something else. I guess in the end it's none of my business, harumph.

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