A BEST FRIEND FOR YOUR BOOKSHELF
The good thing about journals is that after you've read them you can dip in again at any page and get caught up in that day's events, action, dilemmas, reflections; once you become more familiar with the contents you can return to your favourite passages for pleasure. It's almost like having a best friend on your bookshelf. The biggest barrier to anyone contemplating writing down their innermost thoughts is crossing that line of inhibition and saying what you really feel about the most intimate of things, without censoring yourself (with the fear of friends or family possibly reading it) or for feeling stupid or embarrassed about opening up on the page and seeing your thoughts in print. Not many people could write a journal account of their life as honestly as Sylvia Plath. It amazes me how disciplined - and with so much devotion - she was able to 'jot down' day after day the beautifully written, perfect prose in her journals; and from such an early age as well, eighteen (she actually started keeping journals in childhood but this edition covers only her adult life). In her own unmistakable voice we see 'Syvie' as the young, naive teenager on the threshold of life, dreaming of the romantic love affairs she longs for; the excited college student working on a New York magazine, an experience she later used for her only novel The Bell Jar; trips to Paris and her honeymoon in Spain; married life with Ted Hughes, the mother of his two children; and all the time living in the shadow of the black depression that would descend on her without any warning. With Sylvia Plath's tragic suicide you can't help but think: what a waste of life, what a wasted talent. Perhaps it was because she knew her own psyche best - she was constantly trying to figure out her feelings on the page - that she was in such a hurry to get everything down before the inevitable happened. Maybe she just burned herself out too soon. The final flurry of stunningly original poems that would later become the posthumous collection Ariel are testament to the short life she was able to pack into the pages of her hefty Journals. The only thing that spoils this otherwise marvellous new edition of the Journals is editor Karen V. Kukil's decision to list the notes of identification of people and places at the back of the book instead of footnotes on the bottom of the pages; it's irritating and bothersome to have to continually flick back and forth and use two different bookmarks to keep your place. Two other books can be read in conjunction with the Journals, and I recommend them both. Sylvia Plath's Letters Home - written mainly to her mother Aurelia Plath, who edited this volume and also provides biographical content about her daughter's life in a lengthy introduction and accompanying side-notes to letters when needed for clarification. Birthday Letters is a beautiful collection of poems by Ted Hughes, written as letters of reminiscence about his life with Sylvia Plath in reply to her account of their marriage in the Journals.
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