LOVING SYLVIA PLATH: A RECLAMATION Debuts One Month From Today!

Dear Readers! Dear Plathians! Dear ones who have been reading this newsletter for three years, waiting for me to finish this damn book— the time is upon us! In one month, on July 9, LOVING SYLVIA PLATH: A RECLAMATION will be in the world. I wanted to make a special announcement here today, for three reasons— first and foremost, to thank all of you for your support over the years. Knowing I have an audience of smart, kind, thoughtful people who love Plath as much as I do to bounce these ideas off of has meant the world to me, and helped push me over the finish line. Thank you! I am so glad all of you are in the world, and that soon, this book will be in the world with you.

Second, Goodreads & my publisher, W.W. Norton & Co., are co-sponsoring a giveaway; enter at this link for a chance to win a free copy of LOVING SYLVIA PLATH: A RECLAMATION. (Unfortunately, this is only open to people living in the US; I know many of you live in the UK).

Third, I am delighted that you can now pre-order your copy of the book from Womb House Books, the very same bookshop of

The Womb House Books Review

fame, owned by my dear friend Jessica Ferri, who also writes brilliant criticism for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times and pretty much anywhere else you can think of. She has been running Womb House Books as an Etsy bookshop for years, and is about to open a brick-and-mortar shop in Oakland, CA— show her all the love!

Pre-orders make a huge difference for the success of books, so if you can pre-order the book, I would greatly appreciate it. So far, the reviews have been positive and generous and have made me feel quite astounded that places like Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, which I have been reading for decades have actually printed pages with my name on them! Oh, brave new world that has such [magazines pages] in it! Just yesterday, I got to read the review forthcoming in BookPage, which called LOVING SYLVIA PLATH “[A] deeply researched analysis of how the popular myth of Plath’s life, one that subordinates her poetry to her depression and her suicide, was constructed by Hughes and maintained by critics from the time of her death in 1963 to the present.”

In addition to the trade reviews, I was blessed with generous blurbs from some of the writers I admire most in the world. The brilliant

Kate Manne

, whose work in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny was invaluable to framing LOVING SYLVIA PLATH, wrote “Brilliant, lyrical, and moving, Loving Sylvia Plath is a riveting story of misogynistic abuse, gaslighting, and the way our culture protects treasured male heroes at the cost of female victims. A must-read for any feminist, any lover of literature, and anyone who simply values a gripping story.”

Superstar beauty critic and burgeoning philosopher

Jessica DeFino

wrote, “To love someone, you must know them. Until this book, audiences have not known Sylvia Plath. With fresh interviews, revisited archival material, feminist theory, and a personal story that parallels Plath's, Emily Van Duyne takes a washcloth to the writer's public image — the mad woman, the sad girl icon — and wipes and wipes away at it to reveal the Plath underneath, Plath as she was: the best of her, the worst of her, the parts she hid in plain sight, the parts she made harder to find. I inhaled Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation like (what else?) air.”

My dear, dear friend, the brilliant sociologist and biographer Gail Crowther wrote, “Loving Sylvia Plath is indeed a reclamation, and one that not only centers, but in many ways, resurrects Plath’s own voice to speak her own truth.” And Linda Wagner-Martin, the extraordinary, trailblazing Plath scholar, and professor emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill wrote, “For the first time, now in 2024, we can begin to understand Sylvia Plath and her poems, thanks to Emily Van Duyne's brilliant book, Loving Sylvia Plath. Writing and making astute choices, she covers more than seventy years of  response to the Plath story--in readable, concise style.”

Books are acts of community and acts of love. Although my name is the only one on the cover, the acknowledgements go on for pages (and could have gone on for more). I wrote this book because I know, if I know nothing else, that when Plath died, she felt totally alone. I wanted the world to know the kind of vast connections and communities she has inspired across space and time. I hope you’ll read it and enjoy it, and be inspired to read, love, and reclaim Sylvia Plath.