sylvia plath

ok, so yesterday afternoon i snuggled down for a bit of afternoon reading with a book i found at the goodwill...sylvia plath's johnny panic and the bible of dreams....a collection of short stories, prose and diary excerpts edited by her spouse....or ex-spouse.....i found ted hughes introduction quite amusing.....he who was serially unfaithful and yet survived her long enough to manipulate her legacy through carefully selected pieces......maybe not carefully selected enough......for the diary entries did somewhat prophesize a romantic attachment to a woman who bought some sort of script from hughes.......and the journal basically color this man as emotionally unavailable and of no practical use in any family sense......i was reminded of virginia woolf's brilliant essay about the need for women writers to have a room of their own.......ted had a room for himself....several floors above the apartment, so the babies wouldn't disturb his concentration.....sylvia must make do with wherever she can find an empty surface to lay pen to paper...between feedings and nappy-changes and teething cries.......the short stories, which hughes panned in his introduction as unworthy of plath somehow......were enlightening......given the timing.....either just before or just after she wrote the bell jar.......a semi-autobiographical retelling of her descent into a nervous breakdown during her college years at smith.......one can hear the same voice in the stories and the journal entries.......recognize her as the source of each......she tells the truth, always the truth of the matter......with no hint of taking sides or pretending that she behaved better than she did....i wonder how modern medications for depression might have changed her course.....if having an au pair might have freed her up to be more of what she felt she lacked at the time of her suicide.....i have also found the dates of these pieces to be telling.....she would be about the age of my mom......and her children would be about the age of my brother and myself.............hard to imagine anything near to the plath-hughes marriage playing itself out in my family.......but i digress.....i still have a chance for a late-afternoon nap in the sunshine that falls at this hour on my loveseat upstairs.......and maybe a bit of time to read more of this book......