Red Comet

I was absolutely riveted by this huge doorstop of a biography exploring the life of Sylvia Plath. I’m not a diehard Plath fan per se, but I am always drawn to books about writers’ lives.

The intersection of Plath’s death with her experiences of motherhood, her writing life, and the failure of her marriage also brings this story firmly into my wheelhouse. (While Plath might not technically have been in midlife, I would argue that she was already precociously facing many of its common pitfalls when she died.)

This book is meticulously researched and includes new archival evidence. I loved… show more.

I generally don’t read biographies (yet I have two on my top 3 for this year.)

I came to read Red Comet by happenstance. I had mentioned to my daughter that I was pleased to finally cross The Bell Jar off my TBR list. It had lingered there for five decades. I lamented that I had waited so long.

For my birthday I received a 1154-page door stop from my daughter. I had never heard of the book and felt I knew all I wanted to know of Sylvia Plath from reading her famous autobiographical novel. I laid it aside… show more.

When I was writing my book about Sylvia Plath, I read many Plath biographies and began to discern which ones were going to teach me something and which ones were not. This book went beyond learning; it made me feel the life of Sylvia Plath.

From the gelatin and raw hamburger meals that abounded in shiny, 1950s America, to the cold chills she felt in a flat in London, all by herself with two very young children months before her suicide, I understood where Plath came from on a much more visceral level.

This biography also showed me just how… show more.

Sylvia Path (1932-1963) was only thirty when she committed suicide in London.

An American girl, alumna of Smith College, gifted and tortured from the start, she became most famous, after her death, for her novel The Bell Jar and Ariel, her posthumous book of lyrics that contains the much anthologized poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.”

She married the British poet Ted Hughes and bore two children. She and Hughes divorced. Much of her lived life is the material for her wrenching poems.

She was sanctified by the women’s movement, but she was no saint. Her legacy is her work.… show more.