"There's no getting up it by the words you know."

A sort-of end-of-year post

Last night, I dreamt I was in England with Gail Crowther, the writer and Plath scholar. I befriended Gail at a conference in Belfast, in 2017. I was already a big fan of her work when we met and, after the official conference drinks at Belfast’s storied pub, The Sunflower, I convinced her to have cocktails with me at the hotel bar. When I think of this, now, the only word I can think to use is, I squirreled her away with me— I knew no one there and was a nobody, having only published two single, short articles on Plath the previous year, in LitHub and Electric Literature. I knew Gail worked on, among other things, people who believed themselves to have been Sylvia Plath in a former life. I am glad to tell you I am not one of these people, now, but it had crossed my mind, many years ago, in college, and I wanted to confess this to Gail. So I squirreled her away to a dark corner of the bar and we chattered on like the good friends we would soon become. Gail’s work said little, explicitly, about her feelings on Ted Hughes, so I burst into relieved laughter when she said how much he put her off— “All that barbarism in the poems, the fucking animal skins lying about his house,” she said, shuddering over her red wine. Her lilting northern accent made liquid of the r’s in barbarism, and turned fucking into foocking, and I was so happy to be out of Trump’s America.

All of which is to say, I had found my people. Or, my person— my Plath-person. Since then, I’ve tramped all over England and Greece with her, talking endlessly about Sylvia Plath and feminism and fascism and love and death and Audre Lorde and Judy Garland and the books we want to write. Somehow, almost every time we get together, one of us loses, or has just lost, someone close to us, often while we are in a different country or continent than the loved one. It reminds me that we were brought together by the death and life of a woman buried far from the people who loved her, raised her, squirreled her or were squirreled by her into dark bar corners for confessions, giggles, tears. I suppose this is why as the year closes out, and I am warm and soft with domesticity during the Christmas break, munching on chocolate in bed at night with my husband while we watch Mark Rylance bring Thomas Cromwell toward his inevitable end, that I dreamt of being in England, being in England and wanting to stay and having/wanting to be home.

What is it, in the end, to be an ambitious woman who also loves her domestic life? When I was preparing for Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation to debut last June, I felt absolutely freed. Finally, finally, the millstone of that first book was off of my neck. I had written a book about Plath that, no matter what anyone else said about it, was good and honest and different from any other book about Plath. I was proud of what I had done. And in June, as the days lengthened and the early, positive reviews, came in, that meant the liberation of more books to me. I could write anything, now. I saw a long vista of my life and it was filled with short, poetic novellas and long, toothsome novels and research-heavy books on rape and theories of knowledge. I saw a stage play and a screenplay. I saw a view, a view to an open field. It was my life, the one I had always wanted and could never see clear to getting. But now I had written one book, one good book that would be out in the world. The book was not merely a book on Plath and feminist researchers and patriarchal violence and epistemologies, although it was all of those things, as well. It was also a road map to that open field. If I found it once, I could find it again.

Open fields, though, are quickly cluttered, when you are a mother. In the last month, I have had a conflict with my husband and children about a prestigious fellowship I applied for. I won’t know if I won it for months, but if I did, it would mean a one-year move. And all that comes with that. And so, here we are again. If I win, they feel a loss. If I lose, they win. I surely won’t win it; it’s terribly competitive. But now, even the anticipation feels bitter.

Plath knew this challenge better than anyone— she told many people about it, in letters from the last year of her life. That time she had taken to write those Ariel poems, those letters, those burnt or missing diaries, those burnt or missing novel pages, the edits on The Bell Jar— she knew, in a way, that it was stolen. Maybe that’s why I love those poems so much— she is stealing that time, that 4 am to 8 am-when-the-babies-wake time, and rather than squirreling it away, she is waving it like a glittering banner of war: I had to steal this time to write, so I swear, these fucking poems will live forever. Even if I have to die.

People go on— have gone on, will continue to go on— about the ways we should not hold Plath up as model. Because she sacrificed her life at the altar of her work, they say, she should be, instead, a cautionary tale— look what might happen to you, ladies, if you follow her path. But if Plath is a cautionary tale for anything, it should be this— she should caution the world we inhabit against holding back women full of ambition and genius. Imagine what she might have done. Imagine it’s January, 1963, that new year— imagine. My heart breaks for it, still; and I write in her stead, still. So many of us do.

I haven’t written in months. I couldn’t. There simply wasn’t time. And so the thing that happens when I don’t write, has happened. I feel a bit mad. I weep. I wander the beach and collect conch shells like a wild witch. I crab at my husband and hate myself, in small increments. I dream of other places, dream of freedom, which is, in the end, found only in the time I squirrel away to carve out new books. “There’s no getting up it by the words you know,” Plath wrote in “New Year On Dartmoor,” just before the last year of her life, in which she wrote the poems that would change everything— for her. For Gail. For me. For so many of you. But that was the thing, the cryptic thing, about that New Year’s poem. She didn’t know the words yet. She couldn’t climb it, yet. She didn’t have the language. But she found it— through that subterfuge and rage and theft that made her name.

I wish this was a simple end-of-year list! I wish I could just link to all the beautiful things people wrote about my one good book, or bitch at the shitty sexist things people said, and write about the books that sustained me. But I can’t. These words will be what they are. We are entering Trump’s America, again, and I feel a strange shift, a foreboding, as I wander the cold beach alone, collecting my talismans. I want something new. I want to escape. Divorce is, as you all know, in the air, but I don’t want a divorce. I want the new words. Tomorrow, I will watch the sun rise by the ocean, and search them out. I’ll fucking steal them if I have to. Watch me.