In the New York Review of Books, Terry Castle goes so far as to blame Sylvia for the suicide of her son Nicholas in Alaska forty-six years after her own death. The facts that Alaska has the second-highest rate of suicide of any US state and that mental illness is widely accepted as genetic were immaterial, apparently, in the face of an opportunity to use the turn of phrase “Lady Lazarus caught up with him at last.” It is clever and spooky indeed, but it is hardly fair. That Castle uses the same piece to accuse Sylvia of making “a sensation still (sometimes) among bulimic female undergraduates” is but one of the scores of dismissals of life-threatening illness among young women as frivolous lifestyle habits.4
I was such an undergraduate, unknowingly worshipping at the altar of Sylvia before I formed the bridge in my mind from her work to her face and legacy. I regret not having been one of her apostles as a girl, but I am glad to have found her when I did: in my late twenties and on a mission of almost evangelical zeal to make the emotions of young women not just visible in the literary world but to make them essential components of it. Sylvia’s work had lingered in my periphery as it did for many girls who had not been assigned The Bell Jar in school but who managed to find her image sprinkled across the sadder corner of the women’s Internet.
I began frequenting anorexia and bulimia blogs in the late 1990s in the hopes of catching one of the few diseases that people actively covet. In an age before ubiquitous digital photography, these online shrines to eating disorders were home to meticulously curated collections of images scanned from magazines alongside quotes that ennobled the disease with a sense of almost divine purpose. A quote from Sylvia’s poem “In Plaster” made frequent appearances. “She doesn’t need food, she is one of the real saints,” it read, ripped brutally from its context in a poem about battling a personified disorder but ultimately starving the sickness to its own death. One of the most famous images of Sylvia served as the avatar for many users of the blogging platform LiveJournal, which I followed in the early 2000s, along with images of Twiggy and Brigitte Bardot.
I am glad that I found Sylvia by accidentally falling down a hole of her words alone, unstrangled by their troubling literary legacy. I was searching for a clever turn of phrase I knew was hers to quote to a man when I was twenty-nine years old. I didn’t know if it came from a novel or from her diaries, so I was looking up her quotes on the website Goodreads. The site is a helpful cheat sheet for those of us who appear to have read far more than we have; it features book reviews, quotes, and synopses of books and also serves as an odd consortium of legitimate bibliophiles and bizarrely resentful readers alike. Somehow I missed The Bell Jar in my formal education but saw it on enough bookshelves at friends’ homes to intuit that it was something I needed to eventually find time for on an extracurricular basis.
But where even prolific authors sometimes have a dozen or so web pages filled with quotes, Sylvia had over thirty. This would be unremarkable but for the fact that she wrote only one novel and a handful of poetry collections. This is a function of the site’s more democratic tools: Users can submit quotes and vote on them so that they are arranged in order of their popularity. Just as her Etsy story confirmed, for a sad woman dead quite young, she had certainly made an impression. With more than ten thousand votes, the quote at the very top had nearly double the votes of those of the two runners-up that dwindled in the range of five thousand or so. It read:
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.
I found myself unmoved by the sentiment and reluctantly disappointed in the readers who had flocked to the site to vote it into the top spot. I had such high hopes for these devoted girls. Sure, I, too, have been frustrated by my own finitude at times. I have mourned the doctor and the movie star and the teenage witch I never became. I can’t speak any foreign languages as well as I’d like to, nor can I juggle or play the piano. But when it comes to living and feeling all the shades of life, I have had quite enough of the ups and downs of mood and tone and would be perfectly content for dull tranquility to replace the sound and speed of chaos. Sylvia and I were off on the wrong foot.
Holding the honor of second place was the quote “If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” This had always been something of a personal motto, and so I felt back on track to liking this woman the girls couldn’t stop talking about. In third was “Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.” This was the kind of thing I wished I had said to a man when I was much younger, had I been in possession of some shred of that conversational boldness. I developed a literary tongue only after such darling proclamations would have long been inappropriate. I immediately bought a necklace bearing the quote from a store on Etsy. I have never worn it, but I have photographed it lying in my palm on more than one occasion.
I finally found the retort I was looking for on the fifth page of quotes. It read “No day is safe from news of you,” and it comes from Plath’s poem “The Rival.” I planned to use it in the event of receiving a text message from a man I’d been dating for five months who had disappeared unceremoniously on Christmas Eve, despite prior plans and his knowing that I would spend my favorite holiday alone were he to cancel. The line was meant to be a clever way of saying that I had been following his social media accounts, knowing full well that despite the existence of the term “ghosting” that we now have for abandoning romantic interests without a word, he was, quite unfortunately, not at all dead. I didn’t use it on him when he reemerged, but I was grateful for having made the excursion to the pages and pages of Sylvia quotes. Further excavation brought me a wealth of gems about love and loss and death. They have all the wit of Dorothy Parker and the devastating brutality of Virginia Woolf. Yet somewhere along the line, the literary establishment lost sight of the genius because they saw it as too wrapped up in girlishness, a niche interest that half the world endures.