I had a recording of Sylvia reading her poem "The Thin People" that occasionally came on when I put my iPod on shuffle, abruptly bringing any party atmosphere to a halt. I could only begin to imagine the pressures that weighed on Sylvia Plath (child rearing, marital distress, bitter London cold) but her work had a normalising effect on my emotional life and her use of language in her poetry and prose, rhythmic, angry, injecting volatile emotion into a myriad of SAT words, rang in my head as I walked to class or drifted off at 4am.įor a "free form" class project in senior year I did a quiz show-style performance piece based on her life ("Ted Hughes cheated on Sylvia Plath: True or False?") and my final paper in my 20th-century Poetics class compared her work to that of Alanis Morissette ("Angry Girls: Alanis and Sylvia face off"). Although I firmly catalogued myself as "anxious but not depressed", I was inexorably drawn to the work of women who existed on the lip of a complete and utter nervous breakdown.
My focus through most of college was "confessional female poets" with an emphasis on those who had committed suicide.
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