Some Thoughts On Survival

Happy Summer, Plathies. Incredibly, to me, Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation will be published in the United States on July 9, less than two weeks from now. It will be out in the UK August 23. If you are in the Bay Area, you can come see me launch the book at Womb House Books with my friend, the brilliant and wonderful Jessica Ferri, of

The Womb House Books Review

. I would love to see you there. I will also be teaching a three-week, online course about Sylvia Plath for the 92nd St. Y, and there are still spots available, if you have any interest. And, although I can’t announce it yet, I will also be a guest on one of my favorite podcasts soon. Can’t wait!

As the publication dates get closer, I find myself alternately very emotional and strangely calm. Already, I have read some reviews, all positive (well, one person on NetGalley said my writing put her to sleep, but you can’t win ‘em all— Tia S., wherever you are, but I hope you enjoyed the nap). There will be more to come, but it feels sort of finished, if that makes sense. The books are printed! Can’t change a thing. There is a lot of relief in this.

That relief has opened up a fresh world of inquiry into other topics and genres. I’ve been writing up a storm, working on an essay about my lifelong struggle with trichotillomania that will be forthcoming in

Jessica DeFino

’s The Review of Beauty, and an essay for Literary Hub on the relationship between Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes, Palestine, the shibboleth, and Zadie Smith’s bad faith take on the latter in The New Yorker. I’m writing about how men explain Sylvia Plath to me, on and off the internet. And the deadliness of fat phobia, informed by the work of

Kate Manne

and

Virginia Sole-Smith

, and how this killed my friend Dawn, a few years back, the woman who quite literally saved my infant son and me from my violent ex, many years back. We survived because of her; it’s absurd and horrible that she could not survive our fatphobic medical system.

And I’m digging into the writing of my next nonfiction book. Initially, I thought this would be a fairly straightforward history of campus sexual assault, beginning in the middle of the twentieth century. Some of you know that I was an outspoken critic of my workplace, Stockton University’s, botched handling of a campus sexual assault crisis back in 2018-2019, which landed me in a workplace nightmare (you can listen to me describe this to my friend and colleague Sarah Viren, who went through something similar, in this podcast she wrote, hosted, and produced). But as I’ve begun to think about it, what has come up in the writing is how very entwined rape and education have been for me. As I started writing, I realized this began sometime in the 4th grade, when a young girl a grade ahead of me was sexually assaulted on her walk home from school by two classmates, and we all heard about it, quickly. So I was not, I see, a teenager when this specter rose up to haunt me— to haunt all of us. I was a little girl.

And I thought, as I began to conceive of this book, that Plath would have nothing to do with it. But here I see again how wrong I was. Because what, in my education, was more formative than Sylvia Plath? She is a part of almost everything I tried to learn, to master, to imitate, to refute, from the time I was 14-years old. That’s thirty years! And since Plath, too, was a victim of rape— campus rape, no less— how can I leave her out of this book? Plath is a woman who was silenced in life and in death, whose legacy is simultaneously one of rapid and very public speech, and a pervasive silence that calls us to fill it. We learn, by learning about Plath, what women writers are “allowed” to do, to be, in a library, a classroom, a bookshop, a workshop; we learn what we are able to say about Plath, about her husband. We learn whose version of events is believed.

This was on my mind in the last month, as I reread Lacy Crawford’s extraordinary memoir, Notes On A Silencing, about her sexual assault during her junior year at the elite St. Paul’s School, in New Hampshire. (If you have not read this book, I can’t recommend it enough. It will change you, and the way you think about sexual violence and American education.) Toward the end of the book, dealing with the ramifications of an assault that took place almost 30 years prior, Crawford writes, "If nobody believes you, part of you cannot survive." I can’t get this out of my brain; it’s been batting it about like a cat with string for weeks.

On the one hand, I know this in my bones. I was once a wildly ambitious young girl, always at the head of her class, full of talent and excitement about my future. But I was also a victim of emotional and physical abuse in my home, the oldest child in a functioning alcoholic family, with two parents struggling with intergenerational trauma: poverty, alcoholism, death. Garden variety misery, really, which nonetheless broke a lot of people apart. We live with the ramifications of it today. As I went through puberty, the abuse got worse. And as it got worse, I simultaneously worked to shrink myself and pour my anger about it onto the page, in poetry. This is the time, of course, that I encountered Sylvia Plath for the first time, and began to consider how we knew her story. My writing was, even then, tied up with hers; I was also mad as shit at my father, and I envied her ability to say such outrageous things to hers and then fly off into the ether, never having to deal with the consequences.

I would always, I knew, have to deal with the consequences.

Because when I tried to tell anyone about the abuse, no one believed me.

Actually, it’s stranger than that. They all said two things, and this includes a therapist I was seeing, in my late teens. They said It didn’t happen, and they said, It wasn’t as bad as you think. It’s funny, because at the time, I was so broken and angry that I didn’t stop to consider that these two things cannot exist in the same universe. You can deny that something happened, or you can deny the way it happened— but if you refute someone’s version of an event with a different version, you are, by definition, acknowledging that they event occurred.

And where did that leave me— at 14, 17, 19?

Crawford’s claim that a part of you dies when you are disbelieved speaks directly to me, at those ages. My sense that I was good enough— to go to certain schools, be in certain rooms, go after big things and, above all, be loved— died for a long time. And in America— well, who knows, maybe everywhere— we live with the mythology that ambition is for the young. By the time I landed in the disastrous relationship, at the age of 29, that was part of the inspiration for Loving Sylvia Plath, I had been trying to claw my way back to my early ambition and excitement for being alive for almost fifteen years. I believed that loving a poet (he was a poet) was one way I would do this— I substituted my ambition for his work, in some ways, for my own. I also substituted (sublimated?) my ambition with our rash decision to have a child, early on in our relationship, a project he abandoned almost as soon as our son was born, leaving me to parent on my own. Where I looked for love, I found more violence, more rage, more lies. And more people who disbelieved me.

And what died, in those years? Sometimes it feels like, if I started to make a list, it would go on forever. What I do know is, once the dust cleared, what I could see more clearly was this: that there were so many women like me, who had been robbed of so much more. I wanted to tell our stories.

One such woman, of course, was Sylvia Plath. Lacy Crawford’s line about disbelief and survival kept returning me to Sylvia Plath. On the one hand, I hope more than anything that Loving Sylvia Plath is a kind of resurrection. No one can bring Plath back, of course, but this book attempts to shed a lot of light on parts of her life— namely, intimate partner violence and sexual assault— that were cut from her narrative. Or, if they squeaked in, were fraught with disbelief. Well, I thought, so maybe disbelief doesn’t kill us, after all.

It took me about twelve seconds to realize the irony and absurdity of my thought. For whatever truths about Plath’s life this book might resurrect, Plath killed herself at the age of 30, partly as a result intimate partner violence, and depression that was exacerbated by it. As for belief— I know in my bones that Plath died partly because she knew her version of events would drown beneath the weight of Hughes’s.

And, for decades, it did.

In spite of that drowing, so many of us had the world cracked open by Plath’s story, and poems, in any form we could get it. Plath’s voice— Plath’s mystery— outlived her, and Ted Hughes. It will outlive me, a woman grateful to be a footnote in her story, grateful that, in writing about the parts of her story so long covered up and disbelieved, she helped me resurrect ambitions and desires in myself that I thought were long dead. And she became a kind of avatar for me, a way to prove to myself again and again— this happened. The way I said it did. It happened to Sylvia. It happened to me. It’s part of what killed Sylvia, and part of me did not survive it. But writing this reminds me how many lives we can lead in a single lifetime. It reminds me that a book has its own life, one it can offer up to countless, faceless strangers: cracks in the wall where the light gets in. An entrance; an exit: sorties. May I live to write another book, and another after that. May you walk into every life they said you couldn’t have, with your eyes open and up.