I’m not a sad girl, but I’m not not a sad girl. February 11th marked 61 years since Sylvia Plath’s death, and I’ve found myself thinking way too much about it. There was an extended period of time when I wouldn’t go anywhere without my copy of The Bell Jar tucked in my bag, like it was some sort of Bible, the same way I had done for years before with Stephen Grosz’s The Examined Life. Sylvia Plath committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in her prime years as a writer, having just published The Bell Jar on 14th January. In other words, she stuck her head in an oven when she was 30, carefully taped up the walls of her children’s bedroom in her Primrose Hill home, and left a suicide note which simply read ‘Please call Dr. Horder.’
I first read Lady Lazarus when I was 15 or 16 and I was captivated, Esther’s hemorrhaging scene in The Bell Jar was unforgettably visceral, along with the opening lines of the novel, and Daddy always struck me as being the timeless voice of Plath, and many women of the confessional genre. It always amazed and pained me how beautifully Anne Sexton wrote about Sylvia, particularly in Sylvia’s Death, I can still recall the distinct pang I felt when I first read the line ‘O Sylvia, I remember the sleep drummer/ who beat on our eyes with an old story,/ how we wanted to let him come/ like a sadist or a New York fairy’. There seemed to be an unwavering child-like quality in both Plath and Sexton’s works, paired with jaded anecdotal details. The image of the ‘New York fairy’ and the grief Sexton writes about are profoundly juxtapositional; it makes you wonder, it makes you want to be in on the inside joke, or the reference, or the memory. Sexton talks about how they ‘downed three extra-dry martinis in Boston’ in a poem about Sylvia’s death; that kind of casual disclosure of eventless events always fascinated me. It makes me think of Frank O’Hara’s free verse, and the New York school of poets and their abstract expressionism, and Joni Mitchell, and more recently, Conor Oberst, and the way I’ve thought about everyone I’ve ever loved, and the careful reckless noticing you do when you care deeply about something.
Anne Sexton killed herself in 1974 by carbon monoxide poisoning, the same way Sylvia did.
I was recommended the works of Anne Sexton by a mentor at school, it struck me then that I come across as somebody who would enjoy the confessional, do I come across as inquiring? Or repressed? Or is it inquisitive? Or am I asking too many questions about the question? Regardless, he was right, I do keep a special place in my heart for these women who came before me, and their honesty and vulnerability, and the way they taught me to be okay with the vague feelings, the dull feelings. While both Sexton and Plath’s lives ended tragically and far too soon, I never want to let that outshine their vulnerability and generosity of emotion throughout their difficult time here. I like to believe Sylvia still lingers somewhere around Primrose Hill in the house where Yeats once lived, where she had always wanted to be.