Poured Over: Lee Kravetz on The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.

“The thing that really sort of blew me away, one of the reasons why we have sort of the type of poetry that we have today and the type of literature that we have today — it bloomed and was, I think, seeded in some ways by Sylvia Plath and her experience.” Lee Kravetz joins us on the show to talk about his unexpected and entertaining debut novel, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., part literary mystery, part portrait of an immensely talented young woman and her impact on the world around her. Lee tells us about re-reading The Bell Jar, what he learned about poetry in order to write his new novel, the connection between confessional poetry of the 1960s and grunge music of the 1990s, the writers who’ve influenced him, and much more.

Featured books:

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. by Lee Kravetz

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Life Studies and For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

Barnes & Noble: Lee Kravetz, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. You have written a book that I did not expect called The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., and yes, there is only one Sylvia P, and we are going to get to her, but Sylvia Plath changed the landscape of American poetry. Now, granted, she was not alone in that, and we will get to those other folks as well. But I have to ask, why this book? Now?

Lee Kravetz: You know, it’s a great question. First of all, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on, Miwa. So yeah, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. Isn’t it fascinating that 50/60 years since Sylvia Plath started writing that her work is still so crucial. And so of the moment, and I’ll tell you is one of those things that when I started rereading Sylvia Plath, I was just sort of blown away by how her message and her voice and her metaphors and her poetry and, of course, The Bell Jar, itself, still resonates. I honestly couldn’t wait to dive in and just start to learn as much as I could about her. Even before I started writing the novel.

B&N: I was rereading The Colossus as I was prepping for this conversation, and it reads like it was written very recently and same for The Bell Jar. I mean, there are some references in The Bell Jar were like, Oh, right. Okay. Right. But the emotional terrain that Plath covers is very sort of, of the moment and has been for a lot of, not just women, I should say, for readers in general. I mean, she goes to places that a lot of her peers, were not necessarily prepared to go until we get into the room with Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, and we will come back to them.

LK: But that sounds good. Yeah, but it’s true. You know, I’ll tell you, the thing that really sort of blew me away was, you know, one of the reasons why we have sort of the the type of poetry that we have today and the type of literature that we have today, it bloomed and was, I think, seeded in some ways by Sylvia Plath and her experience, specifically at McLean Hospital, I discovered or rediscovered The Bell Jar. A couple of years ago, I was working at a mental hospital, actually, at the time, and I was doing some postgraduate work. And this is before I actually wrote any of my books, and I’m walking through and it actually was the same hospital that Ken Kesey had worked at when he started writing, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So there’s something in the air as I’m walking through this hospital, and I come across a kiosk in the patient waiting room that actually has The Bell Jar in it and I start rereading the book. And as I’m reading it, you know, I’d read it years before many of us have, but I’m rereading it as an adult. And I’m seeing a parallel story really, of the birth of confessional poetry, which actually was born not in a city or a university, like so many forms of poetry have, the confessional poetry was born in mental hospitals. And you see it with Sylvia Plath at McLean Hospital with Anne Sexton, as well as Robert Lowell, who all sort of suffered from mental illness. Most of them had what is bipolar today, but back then it was it was called manic depression. They all had that in common. And then they emerge from these sort of psychology experiences, these sort of mental asylums experiences, writing about their experiences, and it was that wrongness, that stark holding on to the truth, so to speak, and talking about what they’re thinking and feeling and how they’re behaving. It was such an in stark contrast to what everybody else was writing about at the time. And that was the story I cannot wait to tell.

B&N: Part of Sylvia Plath’s story too, is what’s become not pleasant stereotype of the disaffected housewife, right? When in fact, yes, she was married. Yes, she had children. That was just part of her story. But there is this narrative, especially from the 50s and Anne Sexton too, it was applied to her it was applied to many women writers in that era, where a lot of folks are saying, Oh, well, isn’t that cute? But what are you doing, you’re supposed to have dinner on the table, you’re supposed to be focused entirely on your children and not have ambition, ambition was really a problem.

LK: It was. And if you didn’t have confessional poetry, you wouldn’t have the sort of disaffected youth that became the 90s grunge movement, or, you know, the sort of confessional songwriting that we all know today. And if you go all the way back to where it started, that it didn’t start from the type of writers and artists and musicians that we think about today, but actually housewives from the 1950s. That is a stark contrast, it sort of kicks you off balance, in some ways, like wait, really, it started there, the seeds of this all come from a place of being disaffected of being marginalized, being sort of like put in sort of certain parameters and being told to stay there. And yeah, you know, in some ways that this story now has become sort of well worn. And we’ve told the story many, many times. But I think the reason we go back to it over and over again, is because it is so intriguing. It’s important. And I think we all sort of have that moment, that piece of us where we sort of realized, well, gosh, I don’t want to be there. I want to sort of break out of my own boundaries as well. And what can I do with that? And when we look at Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, all the women sort of poets of the confessional movement, that’s what they all have in common, and they sort of tell us, I’ve been there too.

B&N: It’s much more subversive than they get credit for being their work is much more subversive their entire lives, in many cases, are much more subversive than they get credit for.

LK: That’s what makes it so, so wonderful to read. Now, as you know how honest and open, you know, their poetry reads, and we kind of get into who they really were and their secret lives that are sort of exposed through their work. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing to read.

B&N: I want to talk about the structure of this book for a second because there’s a lot of ground to cover. Yeah. And as much as I love the ladies, and would love to keep talking about it, we are going to bring in a little bit of the book structure here, you have brought together three narratives. Well, two kind of vaguely similar time periods and then one present day. So this is a combination of psychological portraits of these women as well as Sylvia I mean, yes, Sylvia’s ultimately revealed through them, but it is very much a portrait of these women as well. It’s also a bit of a literary mystery. So would you set this up for listeners?

LK: You got it. Yeah. So, I come at this book from a sort of prismatic approach. And the idea originally, was that I wanted to explore all the people that influenced Sylvia Plath, but also the way that Sylvia Plath influenced all these different people all throughout time. And so I knew early on that there was going to be a story of Sylvia Plath at her very, very beginning, a story of her on her rise to becoming Sylvia Plath, and then a modern storyline as well. So we could sort of see how each phase sort of influenced the people around her. But of course, that’s a huge amount of story to tell. And also to sort of do it in a way where each storylines for plays into each other and informs the other was also a really challenging task. But it was also one that I knew that I knew the story needed to include. So you really do in the beginning, you see Sylvia Plath, and her psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Barnhouse, who was a very real person in a very real influence in Sylvia’s life. And we start to see, you know, about 10 years later, Sylvia, she’s introduced to a rival that is just awful to her. But in the same way, also sort of influences Sylvia, to become this Sylvia that we all know and love today. And then, of course, you have the modern storyline of a curator at an auction house, who discovers what may or may not be an original handwritten draft of The Bell Jar. And that discovery, sort of, since we’re on a journey to discover, you know, her own sort of connection to Sylvia Plath. And so each of these sort of points of view, and each of these sorts of desires sort of come together at the end to become sort of, you know, a full portrait of Sylvia Plath in a way that I hope most readers have never actually experienced before.

B&N: And Boston Rhodes is the pen name of Agatha Grey, who is Sylvia’s rival and drives quite a lot of the story and makes, she makes some choices.

LK: Yeah, Agatha Grey winds up taking on the pen name of Boston Rhodes. And we sort of see how Boston is both inspired by Sylvia but also greatly challenged by Sylvia as well, both our natural talents, both come from the perspective of housewives in some way, who are rising through this new era of confessional poetry, and are kind of competing for that title of the crown of confessional poetry. And Boston Rhodes, or Agatha Grey, winds up making some choices, as you say that both push Sylvia towards greatness but also threaten to destroy both of the women.

B&N: And Boston does have elements, her story has elements of Anne Sexton’s story and Sexton and Plath were sort of notoriously friends and rivals, and both students of Robert Lowell’s class at BU, which if you think about how much poetry brain powers in that room for what, two hours a week, it was not a formal class, it was a workshop situation and there’s Anne ashing her cigarettes into her shoe. It’s right we’ve, we’ve all heard this story.

LK: It’s true. It’s totally okay. Anne Sexton was as much an influence for me in this book as Sylvia Plath was I mean, I love Anne Sexton’s work. And I think her story is absolutely fascinating. I mean, Anne got her start in writing poetry at a fairly, she was older, she was almost 30, I believe. And she stumbled into it. She had tried many, many other things in her life. And she had, you know, by her own admission, felt like she had failed at doing all of the things that she was expected, quote, unquote, and expected to do, whether it was being a mother or a housewife, things that she thought she would be good at, but wasn’t and then all of a sudden, she discovers poetry, and she starts writing and within a year becomes this powerhouse of creative output. And so I was like, this is somebody who I really want to get to know when I started constructing The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., I knew that and was going to be a presence within the book, but I also knew that I could didn’t stop with her Boston Rhodes, or Agatha Grey, needed to be somebody who was Sylvia Plath’s equal but also somebody who was willing to go to places that Anne Sexton could not go. And so that’s where Boston Rhodes really became Boston roads. she winds up doing things and thinking things that Anne Sexton obviously did not think or do, but Anne’s heart is definitely in this book.

B&N: So we have these three women. We have Ruth, who’s the doctor, we have Boston, who’s the poet, and we’ve got Estee, who’s the curator. Obviously, Sylvia Plath is the big beating heart of your book. But which of the other women showed up first?

LK: It’s absolutely Ruth Barnhouse. Ruth Barnhouse was a real person. She was Sylvia Plath’s psychiatrist when she was first admitted to McLean Hospital in 1952. And they wound up becoming close and staying close up until Sylvia Plath’s final days. There’s not a tremendous amount written about Ruth Barnhouse. We know that she was a psychiatrist. She was one of the first female psychiatrists in New England, possibly even the country. And when she started working at McLean Hospital, a lot of her approaches to psychology were very different than you know, the male sort of psychiatrist who sort of overran the whole profession. That, to me sounded fascinating. I wanted to know who this person was, we do know she actually became a priest years later. What’s fascinating though, is that she winds up appearing in The Bell Jar, she is a character known as Dr. Nolan. And so if you read the Belcher, you know that Ruth Barnhouse needed to be in it, both in real life and also in my novel, Sylvia shows up at the hospital, having just suffered a sort of a mental breakdown, she was highly manic at the time, and she wasn’t able to read or write when she was admitted into the hospital. And so Dr. Ruth Barnhouse, in the novel, winds up rehabilitating Sylvia and teaching her how to read and to write. And not only that, but to pour her thoughts and feelings into the writing in such a way that she can sort of break free in a way that she’s never done before.

B&N: Let’s talk about the research for a second because obviously, you have the freedom, as you said, to give Boston Rhodes, her personality and fill in the details for Dr. Barnhouse. And certainly details for Sylvia herself and Estee is all yours.

LK: Very, she’s all me actually.

B&N: And she has a stand in for all of us, honestly. I mean, she’s working in 2019. She’s trying to piece this together. I love the origin story of the notebooks, we’re going to let listeners discover that for themselves. Because it’s a very fun moment, you’ll get a laugh, but let’s talk about the research for a second you talk about it in an addendum. And it’s really interesting and small, which I like it’s very focused, you’ve got very specific biographies, all of which I expected to see. Yeah. And then a book about poetry by Matthew Zapruder.

LK: Yes, I’ve known Matthew for years, I write here in San Francisco. And we’re both members of the San Francisco writers grotto. And we’ve been on tour at the same time. So I think I ran into him at the Texas Book Festival a couple of years ago. And so Matthew and I have sort of run in the same circles for a long time, Matthew, also, I think he was the poetry editor of the New York Times a couple years ago. So we’ve been following each other’s careers. And actually, I called him originally in some ways to get his blessing. When I started writing this book, you know, I called him up and I said, you know, I’m writing about a subject I know very little about, and you know a lot about it, not just poetry, but confessional poetry, tell me everything you know, and by the way, I’m going to give you my take on it, correct me, tell me if I’m wrong. Tell me if I need to change. And Matthew was great. Matthew teaches this stuff. He lives and breathes it. I’m a huge admirer of his work. He’s written I think two books now on poetry and how to write it and why poetry is so beautiful and meaningful and important. So once I finished the book, I basically said this is what I wrote. And this is what it’s about that I captured, right, that I do it right. And Matthew was wonderful. He said, Yeah, you nailed it. So I owe him a great debt.

B&N: Is that your biggest surprise while you were writing? The Confessions, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., that you got the poetry piece, right, Matthew blessed it?

LK: I think there was definitely that. And I’ll tell you, there’s something that it’s sort of the elephant in the room, which is a man writing from the perspective of three women. You know, I think it’s an important thing to sort of address because I do think it’s a delicate topic. I also think it’s an important topic to bring up. I think it’s an argument that deserves a lot of focus. I’ll tell you though, I didn’t really sort of come at this from the perspective of a man writing from a female perspective. I came at it from almost a psychology perspective, from the perspective of a psychologist and how art specifically influenced three people. So Dr. Ruth Barnhouse, needed to be female. She was female Boston Rhodes, or Agatha Grey, I needed a character who was so similar to Sylvia that if you lined them up, you almost couldn’t tell them apart. And the intrigue for those two characters was well where did one go one direction one go the other and so they needed to be similar to the third perspective, you know, the curator, actually, I struggled with that character a lot. I really did. I wrote probably five drafts from five different points of view. They were all male, actually. And so you’ll read the book and you’ll see who these male characters are. Each male character was originally when the primary point of view, and then eventually it just like a Rubik’s Cube sort of clicked into place. And I realized it needed to be a woman as well. It just sort of resonated in a way that the male characters did not. There are male characters within the book, obviously. But I started looking at it from the perspective of, well, if I’m looking at three characters, who are different versions of Sylvia Plath, let’s see what would happen. And psychologically speaking, I thought that’s where I found most of my ground that needed to be covered.

B&N: All of them are ambitious in their own ways. All three, Ruth, Estee and certainly Boston, they’re all a little mad at the world. Some know this more than others. Estee doesn’t always know where her feet are. But she comes to understand some stuff. But atonement is also part of this narrative. And we are going to talk about this very obliquely, very, very obliquely. Yes, because this is the kind of book that you need to experience. It’s also surprisingly short. I was not expecting it to be so tiny, but it really moves. Yeah. But atonement, means different things to different characters as it should. Yeah. And each of these women puzzled through atonement in their own way. And one of them makes a choice. That, for the narrative sake, I understand, artistically, I absolutely understand. But on the human side of things, I don’t really agree with this big moment, at the end of the book, which we’re going to talk about sort of sideways, yeah, that people can experience it for themselves. But I want to talk about how you arrive at a big defining moment. And granted, of course, we’re talking about a novel, you can do whatever you want, but it needs to work. This works this, it’s in keeping with the character, it’s in keeping with the story, it’s in keeping with everything, but I had a moment as a reader where it’s like, yeah, I don’t agree with that.

LK: Right, she makes a choice that 99.9% of people in this situation would not do, and I think Estee needed to do that. Because, like poetry, the poetry is very personal. You know, when you read a poem, you know, we sort of see it through the lens through which we see our own reality. And what I try to get across in the book is that The Bell Jar, no matter how many millions of people read this book, throughout time, every person sees it through the lens through which they see the world. And I really wanted to get that point across for Dr. Ruth Barnhouse, she saw the world as being healthy or unhealthy. Boston Rhodes sees it as you either got to win, or you are going to lose for Estee, the curator. You know, I think she really struggles through the book to figure out what you know how she sees the world and how she’s supposed to see the world. She’s seen it through the prism of history, her whole life, almost as a passive observer. And by the end of the book, she kind of reclaims the part of her that she’s sort of lost in her own journey. And she makes a decision that sort of is a defining moment in her life, and has consequences for the rest of the world, obviously, as well, but it is controversial. And I’ll tell you that ending was something that I knew was going to happen from the very beginning. It had to.

B&N: So, even when Estee was still a dude, before you’d figure it out her voice and figured out her role. This was gonna happen?

LK: Oh yes, this was absolutely going to happen When it was from the point of view of any of the male characters, it was, Well, why would they do what needed to happen at the end? So it was inventing their whole backstory and finding their motivation. When I landed on Estee as the major point of view character. It was so obvious why she would do what she had to do. It just made sense.

B&N: I still don’t agree with it. But yeah.

LK: Oh, yeah. You’re not supposed to agree with it. It’s actually pretty horrible what she does. It is horrible on multiple levels. And it’s selfish and it’s unfair, but it’s also it was right for the story. It had to happen.

B&N: It’s also right for her. I just thought it was not her decision to make that was part of it. It’s it’s she’s inserted herself into the narrative. Again, I know we’re sort of dancing around this. No, exactly. It’s a fun conversation to try and have without spoiling it for other people. Because I do think especially when you go through the story with these women, and they’re all grappling with multiple meanings of art, even the doctor at one point she hands Plath a copy of Finnegans Wake. And Plath marks it up so that she’s created a found poem out of a piece of Finnegans Wake, and the doctors like well, I guess I have to go replace the book, because I don’t really know what to do, but she’s being forced Ruth is being forced to see the world through a different set of eyes.

LK: Mm hmm. That’s exactly right. I think that’s where the change for each character comes from. We’ll start with the point of view of Sylvia, Sylvia Plath forces the world rolled around her to see the world through her eyes. And I think that was the place where I started. I was like God, I want to know more about Sylvia. And you know, you read The Bell Jar, it’s a veiled memoir, thinly veiled memoir, but you’re reading The Bell Jar, you’re like, wow, now I know her. What’s really fascinating is when you’re reading The Bell Jar, and then you read some of her poems, some of the characters that appear in the bell jar actually appear as characters or portraits in her poetry. And that’s where they talk about research. There are these lightbulb moments where you’re reading Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper, which is, you know, very simple poem that Sylvia wrote early on. And it’s basically following Miss Drake walking along a carpet and going to dinner, going to supper, walking into this into the room. And then as you’re reading the poem, you realize that at some point, the whole poems shifts, and you realize you’re following patient in a mental hospital, who’s literally following the carpets into the dining room, that character makes an appearance in The Bell Jar. And I was like, oh my god, this is such a great discovery. Tale of a Tub. It’s a poem about a bathtub, someone submerging herself in a bathtub, well that took place at McLean Hospital, and actually appears in The Bell Jar as well. So you start piecing all these things together, and you realize what you’re doing. When you read The Bell Jar, you’re seeing the world through the eyes of somebody who was really special. What I tried to do in the novel is actually show how the characters around her start to view the world through her eyes as well. But also the way that Sylvia starts to see the world through their eyes. There’s a scene where Dr. Barnhouse takes Sylvia into downtown Boston, because she wants her patients to see the world the beauty, the freedom, the individuality that people can have in the world. And Sylvia until that point, has never had that experience before. And we see in the novel how that sort of really influences her when she starts to write The Bell Jar, as well.

B&N: Well, The Bell Jar has never been out of print, never the entire time. And I do love the story of how it came to be in the States because it was published in the UK under a pseudonym everyone though sort of knew it was Sylvia Plath, her husband’s Ted Hughes. She’s an acclaimed poet, everyone in the UK, in certain circles, sort of knew. And there were bootleg copies brought to the US and sold by a couple of different bookstores.

LK: Isn’t that incredible? I love that copy. I mean, something like that happened today. That would be incredible. What a story that is a New York Times story right there bootleg copy of a novel, there are only 1000 copies in print, written under a pseudonym, which by the way, when The Bell Jar first came out, it was not that successful. It really wasn’t. And it wasn’t until it was actually after her death. She died really shortly after publishing the book. And then a book of poetry came out. And then her name started becoming, you know, synonymous with the poet that we know and love today. And then it was only a couple of years later, where it’s reprinted under her real name in the United States. And it has never been out of print. In fact, I saw the paperback order from Harper a few days ago. And we’re like, gosh, you know, this is one of the most influential books of all time, and it’s not just the 20th century. It’s the 21st century and this is not a book that’s necessarily required reading in school. So this is like independent young readers discovering The Bell Jar, discovering Sylvia Plath, discovering a voice that to this day resonates. I’m not surprised that I fell in love with it again. I’m not surprised that other people still are as well. She didn’t just break ground. She’s broken it for 1000s of other people, millions of other people since then.

B&N: There are folks who think that memoir sort of as we know, it started with say Mary Karr and The Liar’s Club or Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl Interrupted, and in fact, really did start with Sylvia Plath.

LK: It did. The Bell Jar really is her story. If you read her journals, there’s been a number of wonderful, wonderful books that have come out about Sylvia Plath over the last few years. And you realize as you’re reading The Bell Jar, just how much of a memoir this was other than the changes in names. It’s a memoir. What’s amazing about it, though, is she wrote the book 10 years after these experiences, by that point, she really was a different person. So the fact that she was able to lead back in to the version of herself who was fully manic, from page one, to write it in such a way that for most readers, they don’t realize that she is in danger until about the halfway mark in the novel is brilliant because she’s been in danger since page one. That to me is remarkable. It is a masterclass in craft, just a brilliant model for many, many writers to follow.

B&N: It was the summer of the Rosenbergs died. That’s exactly right. It was the summer the Rosenbergs done. So obviously, Sylvia herself and Anne Sexton are influences for you. I’m going to assume that there’s a little bit of Lowell in that mix as well. I mean, For the Union Dead and certainly Life Stories as well. And, my copy actually has the two collections bound together.

LK: And rediscovering Robert Lowell was fascinating, brightly fascinating. He’s incredible, the little details that he puts in his poems that create these huge images. It’s gotten to the point now when I think about the 1950s, and poetry in the 1950s. And even before then, I see it through that lens. I see it through the way that he described the sky, the little details around you the coats that they wore the feel in the air. I mean, he just so beautifully captured it. And what’s amazing is that when you read about who Robert Lowell was, this guy was brilliant. But he was also like, constantly suffering from manic depression. I mean, his manic episodes are legendary. His depression was legendary. And he was able to pull it together for the class, Robert Lowell poetry class for two hours a week. He was able to do it and hold that class together and basically start confessional poetry from that little classroom. But the minute he got out, oh, boy, I mean, this is a guy who was let loose. And I mean, he suffered quite a bit because of it, but boy, does that poetry just grab you and throttle you.

B&N: Okay, so we’ve got Plath, Sexton, Lowell, who else are some of your literary influences?

LK: They’re not poets, actually, not poets. I’m very much the character of Estee, in this book, like many people are, who I think are gonna discover the novel. They’re basically poetry novices, I knew very little about poetry. When I started this, that’s why I talked to Matthew Zapruder. Right. I was like, please tell me what do I need to know, I tell you a lot of my contemporaries, the ones that I love, are all San Francisco based. I moved from New York to San Francisco to be a San Francisco writer. And this was 20 years ago. So anybody who knows me knows that were my influences on my sleeve. Michael Chabon is by far the biggest. In fact, I moved to the Bay Area when I was 23 years old. And my dad sent me two books in the mail. And he said, Lee, you want to be a San Francisco writer. There’s a guy who’s living in Berkeley, his name is Michael Chabon, you should read these books. And I had heard a little bit about him. I read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh for my dad, and then Wonder Boys, and I was blown away. I mean, I didn’t know anybody could write like that at all. And I still don’t know how he does it. This guy just he lives and breathes from a perspective I can’t even emulate, I wouldn’t even try. But I remember back then, this is before he became the Michael Chabon that everybody knows and loves. He had his email on his website. So I emailed them, like, Dear Michael, my name is Lee. I’m a Jewish writer. I want to be like you. Live in Berkeley. I loved your two books at that. They’re fascinating. Can’t wait to read The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I hit send. The next day, he wins the Pulitzer Prize. And I was like, oh my god, I just lost my author. He was mine. And now he’s the world’s. That night. That very night, he wrote me back. And it was a short note. But it was really powerful and meaningful. I framed it on my desk for years. It was just the kindest thing and I was like, that’s the kind of writer I want to be. So Michael Chabon, obviously Dave Eggers is, you know, came out with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius around the exact same time, Glenn David Gold wrote Carter Beats the Devil, you know, he was a big one of mine as well. And, you know, I’ve sort of moved on a little bit out of the Bay Area writers to Richard Powers. And looking at my list right now who I have here, I go back to Paul Auster quite a bit. And Anthony Doerr, you know, new book, the prismatic approach that he sort of takes with his latest novel, it’s something that really resonated with me, as well.

B&N: The Memory Wall, you need the stories in the memory while I’m a huge fan of that book, the Doerr.

LK: Exactly right. It’s so good. It’s so good. So that those are sort of the guys who influenced me as far as poetry though, before I wrote this book, the closest I came to really appreciating poetry was James Dickey. And it wasn’t because of his poetry, it was because, you know, he wrote Deliverance. And I was always curious about how a renowned poet would tackle a narrative subject that’s so dense and scary and frightening and beautiful, at the same time. That guy just nails it.

B&N: It’s the cadence of the sentences, and there’s a musicality to his prose that not a lot of people can do. Ocean Vuong, does it. And man, does he do it? Wow.

LK: I read his book that came out last year. And I’ll tell you, that one just absolutely moves you, and it is the cadence, I’ll tell you, it’s a cadence that actually taught me how to be a novelist. Here, I have my phone. And I use the record app all the time. When I’m writing, I get into a cadence and I sort of take on the voice and tone of the character. And if you were to listen to my recordings, I’m actually speaking in the voice of Boston Rhodes. I’m speaking in the voice of Ruth Barnhouse. And I’m trying to get that cadence I’m trying to try on that character. And I’ll tell you, that’s the technique that actually unlocked this entire book. For me, it’s finding that cadence. Joshua Moore, a terrific novelist, terrific memoirist is not a poet. But if you read his work, his lyrical, there is a cadence to it. And if you ever talk to him or listen to interviews that he does, he’s another semi local author in San Francisco. He talks about it like writing as though you are in a song. Every character has a beat, every character has sort of a song that they walk to. I don’t think Last Confessions is Sylvia P. made me a poet, but I certainly sort of tried on that cloak, so to speak, and was able to sort of get into these characters. Because if you’re writing about Boston Rhodes, you have to in some way, embody a poet. If you’re writing about people discovering their artistic voice, you have to sort of get into their skin as well. And boy, I mean, that’s fun, but really challenging.

B&N: And this is your first novel. I mean, you’ve written two narrative nonfiction books that the thread is there. I mean, you’re writing about people’s inner landscapes. It just happens this time, you made most of it up. I want to go back for a second, though, and talk about how we got from those very particular books and how we got to the 1950s and 60s and present day in a very different landscape.

LK: I got my start in book publishing, and I spent a lot of my time with, you know, marquee authors from the late 90s, to the early 2000s. And people who have a deep, deep history to literature, I think Gunter Grass was one of my original authors, and Dan Martell. And so I got a really great education in writing. And when I turned 30, I realized, yes, I want to be a writer, but I don’t know what to write about. I know nothing about the world, I have nothing to say. And so I basically gave up on writing. And I decided to get a Master’s in Counseling Psychology. And so I moved back to California, I’m getting my master’s, which was a wonderful experience. And my graduate dissertation came out, it was about three times as long as everybody else’s. And my advisor at the time said, this isn’t really like a dissertation, this reads like a book. He said, What do you want to do with it, you should get it published. So I use my connections. And lo and behold, there was actually a kernel of truth to what this guy said. And it became my first book. So I graduated with a Master’s in Counseling Psychology, but I also had my first book out there through Harper Collins. So all of a sudden, I’m just have this dual track. And the book itself was all about trauma. You know, it was the narrative of trauma. When I was in grad school, I realized, so much of what psychology seems to be about is about the negative effects of psychology. When you think about psychology, you know, you think about depression, anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder, but there was a sliver of research that talked about people who didn’t just experience trauma and bounce back from it, or trying to bounce forward and change their lives in remarkable ways. And I think that was the thing that sort of really caught my advisor’s eye and my publisher’s eye, was that it’s not looking through the silver lining. It’s not looking at a silver lining through psychology, but it’s looking at how trauma changes us. And it definitely harms us without a doubt. But it can also help us change in wonderful ways as well, which is there’s this field of study called Post Traumatic Growth, where you sort of grow from trauma. You know, it’s based on fairly new research that’s come out over the last 20 years. Martin Seligman is sort of a big proponent of this, you know, Adam Grant, who people have gotten to know over the years who are really wonderful in this space, so I wrote Supersurvivors and Supersurvivors was really about how seven people experienced trauma, and then have a wake up moment where they realize, boy, you know, life is really short. What do I want to do with it now, and they want to changing their lives and go on to change the world. As a result, the second book called strange contagion, I took that concept and from the individual and applied it to the collective, there’s a town here in Northern California called Palo Alto, it’s the heart of Silicon Valley. And I look at a really devastating event psychological and emotional event that takes place in Palo Alto. And I look at how the town sort of comes together to sort of acknowledge what’s happening, but also grow from it as well, as well as attempt to try to stop the trauma, which is in this case, there was a series of sort of seemingly contagious youth suicides from one school that didn’t make a lot of sense at all, to anybody who was watching, I think there were 10 students who had died in a five-year period. And so I look at the collective trauma and how the town tries to bounce forward from that as well. And that leads to the thread of psychology, the thread of, of trauma, and trying to sublimate that trauma into something that’s useful and beautiful. That sort of led me directly to Sylvia Plath. That’s really it. Sigmund Freud had some interesting ideas. Freud talks about defense mechanisms, defense mechanisms, largely seen as negatives, you know, if you’re traumatized or angry or hurt you deflect you project, you know, all these sorts of things are basically damaging, but there’s one defense mechanism that is not damaging, and it’s sublimation. The idea that you take all the hurt in the pain, and you pour it all into art, and you can change the world with that. That was where I found Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath is like sublimation prime. That’s what she is. She was like a raw nerve. So the novel was going to be well, how does she learn to channel that and put it into something that not only helps her heal, which it does, but then also changes the world in a way that it just never left it the same again?

B&N: How do you go from being a woman to being an icon?

LK: Isn’t that the interesting thing? That’s why Sylvia Plath is so interesting to so many people right now. She died at a very young age, was 30 years old. She left behind this body of work, there really was something that changed the world that leaves us with this gaping hole. Well, how do we fill that hole? We fill it with mythology, and her myth has become something of legend. I’m not even sure how but it is real. So there’s a lot of ground to sort of invent and discover. And I think that’s why Sylvia Plath appears in so many pieces of fiction. And in so many people’s collective imaginings of who she was, because we sort of mythologize who she is and what she was, even though we don’t know.

B&N: There is also a missing manuscript, and a couple of volumes of her journals that Ted Hughes, her estranged husband at the time, chose to destroy, and they did have children. And what’s done is done. We don’t get to go back in a time machine. But there have been times I would have really liked to have gotten my hands on at least part of whatever was in those because I have a sneaking suspicion that perhaps Mr. Hughes did not come off terribly well.

LK: Well, I think that’s exactly it. Ted Hughes makes an appearance in The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., a lot of times when people sort of portray him, he’s the villain. In this case, I wanted to portray him as somebody who was just on the other side of the poetry argument. He didn’t agree with the kind of poetry she wrote. And in many ways, he was like, he wasn’t her opposite. I think he was just, it, someone’s less than, and I think he was threatened by that. And so I try to really show how he’s sort of always one step behind everybody else. And so every scene that he’s in, in this book, he’s always the one being played, even though he thinks he’s in control. He’s always the one who’s being played.

B&N: Their daughter went out, Frida went on to be a poet, and also apparently has been training as a counselor as well. So I think there’s that intersection again, you can’t really separate the two. But what’s next for you?

LK: Yeah, so, I’m working on a new novel, I think nonfiction I think is in my past. It’s historical fiction. It’s, again, through a prismatic approach, but it takes on a different point in history, and art. And it’s something I’m really excited about. It’s taken about a year to sort of mount this project, I just started diving in to the actual writing in earnest right now. I’m really excited about it. So it’s sort of interesting, though, because as you have one book coming online, and everyone’s gonna start, hopefully start to discover it. You’re sort of already in sort of that next book. But I’ll tell you, it’s taken about a year to sort of have Sylvia sort of let go of my system. I think every project that I considered doing before I started on this new project, it had Sylvia’s voice in it. It had Boston Rhodes voice in it, it had Dr. Ruth Barnhouse’s, it had Estee’s voice, I mean, those voices just sort of they kind of consume you for a really long time. So it took me about a year to sort of kind of shake that out of my system. It’s exciting to see what’s going to happen.

B&N: That’s very cool. That’s very, very cool. The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. is out now. Lee Kravetz, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over.

LK: It has been an awesome experience. Thank you.