On this day, sixty-two years ago, Sylvia Plath gassed herself in her London flat, while her children slept in their nursery. At the time of her death, she had just finished Ariel, and published, under a pseudonym, The Bell Jar. She didn’t know it, but she had remade the lyric poem in her image, radically upended the roman a clef, and given the emerging second wave of feminists the language to name their oppression.
She was 30-years old.
The anniversary of Plath’s death has sometimes left me bereft, particularly when I have lost a friend to suicide, or watched another forced to leave her home because of an abusive spouse. What might these women be, or do, I have wondered, without the threat of patriarchal violence? In Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, I argued that Plath might have survived, or even thrived, without that same threat.
But while Plath did not survive, her art thrived. Thrives, actually, not only in its own right, but in the work she continues to inspire. Or, in the case of Penny Zang’s forthcoming Doll Parts: A Novel, in which Plath simply arrives and, to paraphrase the great Glenn Close, will not be ignored. “I didn’t question her presence,” Zang says of Plath’s appearance, leaning into the both the tropes of the suicidal college sad girl and their deconstruction in her first novel, out this August with Source Books.
Doll Parts is, “The Virgin Suicides meets I Have Some Questions For You in a dual timeline suspense, following one woman as she begins to uncover the truth of the death of her estranged best friend and the Sylvia Plath adoring sad girls they attended college with decades ago, all while holding a secret that will slowly unravel her new, suburban dream life.” It’s available for pre-order here and here and here. Penny is an author and English professor in Greenville, South Carolina. She graduated from West Virginia University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction) and her work has appeared in the Potomac Review, Louisville Review, and South 85, among others. She is the 2024 Elizabeth Boatwright Coker fiction fellow via the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She writes the Substack
.I talked with Penny about Courtney Love, honoring dead girls, how grief becomes a part of us, and weird dreams about Sylvia Plath. I’m excited to share our conversation with you as a celebration of the ways Plath lives on in the brilliant work of women writers. And even more excited for you to read Doll Parts, which I genuinely loved. It is that rare book— literary suspense that never sacrifices lyricism for plot or plot for lyricism. It has me re-reading Plath and blaring Hole’s Live Through This and considering bleaching my hair and ripping my fishnets. Trust me. You want this book.
If you are short on time to listen to our interview, take heart! I will send out an abridged transcript of it later this week. In the meantime, enjoy, and remember to mouth a poem by Sylvia Plath today. Or listen to a woman in need. Or donate to your local women’s shelter. Or curse Ted Hughes, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or any of the many vampire/Nazis who haunt us, these days. It’s what Sylvia would want. Cheers.
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