This book gives Sylvia Plath her due as a uniquely original and groundbreaking poet who struggled against the patriarchal disdain of female poets in the 1950s&60s, the appropriation of her life story by her famous poet husband and others, and by her untimely, tragic death. I have loved everything by and about Sylvia Plath ever since I discovered The Bell Jar (her novel) and Ariel (her latest poetry collection) as a preteen. I’ve read every biography about her, various editions of her journals and letters, her juvenilia, everything. Yet, because she had been reduced to her suicide, her perfectionism and her ambition, over the years since she died, I wondered if there was something wrong with me for finding her language so fresh and forceful and fascinating. This book delves into her life, her ambition, her contradictions and the world she inhabited like no other book before it, finally giving her the respect and the depth she deserve. She was an amazing writer and an impressive person. I could not put this book down.
The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath.
'Surely the final, the definitive, biography of Sylvia Plath' Ali Smith
*WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED PRIZE 2021* *A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH AND THE TIMES* *FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY 2021*
Drawing on a wealth of new material, Heather Clark brings to life the great and tragic poet, Sylvia Plath. Refusing to read Plath's work as if her every act was a harbinger…
This book is dense and enthralling, taking the reader deep into the subconscious of the narrator, a bitter, infuriatingly passive, utterly lucid screen writer who’s witnessing the disintegration of his marriage, as his wife is slowly seduced by the film director. Or has the narrator offered her to the film director or the sake of his career? Is his career worth the cost of his creative love which is theater? The writing is gorgeous and melancholy. Not an easy read but a worthwhile one.
Contempt is a brilliant and unsettling work by one of the revolutionary masters of modern European literature. All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous—his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still-striking openness about sex—are evident in this story of a failing marriage. Contempt (which was to inspire Jean-Luc Godard's no-less-celebrated film) is an unflinching examination of desperation and self-deception in the emotional vacuum of modern consumer society.
The writing in this novel is cutting and sharp and clever, as is the narrator, Fleur, a young writer in post-war London who lands a job transcribing stories for an Autobiographical Association, and finds the members' stories so deadly boring that she needs to embellish them beyond recognition. The world of post-war London and of this young woman’s place in it feels both real and completely invented. Fleur’s voice carries the reader along through many absurdities and ultimately through pathos and heart.
Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with the intent of gathering material for her writing, Fleur Talbot finds a job "on the grubby edge of the literary world" at the very peculiar Autobiographical Association. Mad egomaniacs writing their memoirs in advance - or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? When the association's pompous director steals Fleur's manuscript, fiction begins to appropriate life.
What if the one thing you can't have is the only thing you want? When Mary and Ann agree to a surrogacy partnership everything goes awry. Ann, a pre-school teacher, is desperate for the children she physically can't have. Mary, a 50-year-old pagan jeweler, hopes to make amends for years of maternal neglect. Together, they plunge into the expensive, morally complex world of reproductive technology and an intimacy neither they, nor Ann's husband, Joel, are prepared for. Financially hard-pressed, Joel goes behind Ann's back and agrees to help Mary grow a marijuana crop in her attic. Ann struggles with the rigors and enforced togetherness of the reproductive regime. And Mary's delight in being a "bountiful earth mother" is offset by the physical ordeal of bearing multiple fetuses. The stakes escalate as the police start sniffing around the grow house, a pagan ritual goes tragically awry, and the pregnancy becomes more perilous, forcing Ann, Joel, and Mary to confront the potentially calamitous consequences of pursuing their deepest desires. Sharp and audacious, Made by Mary is a black comedy using magic realism to blow up myths about women, mothers, and motherhood, where even the most extreme situations are rendered with candor, intelligence, and empathy.
