Anne Stevenson (1) (1933–2020)

This is one of the best biographies I've ever read. It must have been a very difficult one to write. Somehow Stevenson manages to tell what she knows about the utter craziness of Sylvia Plath's personality without being judgemental and without making the reader hate her subject (or, conversely, hate the writer).

Plath must have been one of the most difficult people to be around, evah. She could never in her own mind be wrong about anything, so any bad behavior on her part was either blamed on someone else or else instantly forgotten by Sylvia through her strategy of total amnesia. I have known one person like this in my life, and I associate all of the traits I read about here with toxic narcissism, although Stevenson never uses the term.

An example of "bad behavior": Sylvia was married to Ted Hughes, also a poet. They had a good marriage, in that they both respected each other's work. However, Sylvia had a jealous streak that knew no boundaries. She wanted Ted all to herself, all the time. One day Ted and a male friend went to a pub for lunch. Evidently they were gone "too long" (the friend says that for some reason "40 minutes" sticks in his mind). By the time they returned to the flat, they found that in a fit of rage and retribution Sylvia had ripped to pieces all of Ted's manuscripts, notes, and journals. And she evidently did this to him more than once--but not more than twice, because he eventually left her. However, and I don't know this to be true because I haven't read the things he published about Sylvia, his friends say that he never had a bad word to say about her--not ever.

Stevenson chose to include, in the appendix, a memoir of Sylvia written by a woman who knew her well in London. She says that there aren't that many people who are in possession of the facts about Sylvia: "among those of us who are, there must be one or two who can't afford to fall foul of feminist apartheid or risk a boycott by the Lib Lobby. Moreover, nobody I know was prepared to say a word as long as Sylvia's children were growing up, with the result that her hagiographers got a head start of two decades plus in which to shape their apotheosis, which snowballed onward and upward virtually unchallenged."

This was a fascinating, fast, compelling read. I gave it 5 stars.… (mais)