SYLVIA PLATH JOINS WILLAMETTE WRITERS WITH KATE GRAY

Kate Gray explained Sylvia Plath in the best way possible: she wants the world to know ‘the girl’ Plath was before her junior year in college.

I sat in the full-house crowd at Willamette Writers monthly meeting in downtown Portland, marveling that anyone could give such a thorough breakdown of a real person; that anyone could care so much about anything the way Kate cared about Sylvia.

What mesmerized me was the idea of using a compressed time frame to anchor the storyline chronologically, with backstory loops running in and out to paint a complete picture of such a short life.

Kate Gray is writing the book, a Sylvia Plath novel done in a Sylvia Plath voice. Ms Gray even had the last recording of Plath’s voice. What did she sound like?

A little scary. Maybe a lot scary.

Ms Gray started the talk with the standard history of Plath, that she was a poet who stuck her head in an oven and killed herself.

But, there’s more to the story, and it feels personal. Through her research, Kate Gray learned that Plath was a tall woman, a rambunctious kid who mixed it up outside, not a shut-in sitting quietly in an attic behind drawn curtains.

Ms Gray noted Plath’s mental challenges but didn’t dwell on them. In her book, she’s not going into her later life and marriage. Can a novel be a hybrid memoir, a new kind of biography?

Sylvia Plath Memoir?

Yes, and here’s why:

The writer Ms Gray described was a powerhouse girl, a social whirlwind, an academic star. She was an ambitious woman ready to rise. But it was the fifties, the same decade some of our parents met and married.

My mom and dad were a Fifties couple. I remember the first time my brothers and I rummaged around their closet and found the clothes they used to wear. From the looks of it, my mom was a showgirl, and my dad was a Marine.

A closet organizer hung in the back with shoes I’d never seen on my mom’s feet. Decades later, Ma explained the clothes as her college wardrobe. As little kids we thought she must have been a movie star like Marilyn Monroe.

The Fifties weren’t kind to women who broke the mold of expectations.

Sylvia Plath’s story has more than a little movie star in it; review the top pic. She’s up, she’s down, she’s suicidal, she recovers, she marries The Man, then kids, divorce, and death. She could be a one woman show of Little Women.

Kate Brown focused on the brightest time, her junior year in college. I like the timing because things were better controlled.

The longer I listened, the more I thought of Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow. It’s a fictional account of the poet Delmore Schwartz, who influenced Robert Lowell and Lou Reed, among others. The story shares the bad years before he died alone.

I left Willamette Writers glad to think another writer gives readers the benefit of the doubt. We know how Sylvia Plath died; how she lived her best years is the story we need.