Word: plathe
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...seems, every journalist over 30 wants to mine that life for meaning. Or at least gossip. In Boulevard of Broken Dreams (Viking; $22.95), Paul Alexander, who has written books on Andy Warhol and Sylvia Plath, argues that Dean was a homosexual whose romances with starlets were so much unfelt publicity. Alexander scavenges for tatty, tattly tidbits, like the story about the night Dean and a pal picked up a one-legged girl at a bar and ... well, the curious may turn to page 203 for the punch line. And to page 286 for a photograph of a naked young...
...since Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar has a personal account of life in a mental hospital achieved as much popularity and acclaim as Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted. Published in hard cover a year ago, it immediately became a surprise best seller. The paperback edition (Vintage; $10) is now firmly entrenched on the best-seller list. Kaysen has received hundreds of letters from readers who have also been hospitalized for psychiatric problems, and on her just completed tour of 16 cities to promote the paperback, dozens of people whispered their own stories of mental illness to her. To many...
Books: The Alienist is an exceptional thriller; Janet Malcolm mines the Plath myth; Louis Begley's As Max Saw It is perfectly constructed...
...Unlike Plath, who found eternal youth, those who shared her life have had to weather the ravages of time, not to mention public opprobrium. Janet Malcolm, the latest writer to mine the Plath myth, compares the spread of gossip about the poet to "an oil spill in the devastation it wreaked among Plath's survivors, who to this day are like birds covered with black ooze." No one has been more fouled by the Plath oobleck than Hughes. In The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Knopf; 208 pages; $23), Malcolm chronicles how generations of feminist writers have reviled...
Malcolm is sympathetic to Hughes, although he nonetheless comes off poorly in her book, willing to sell the American rights to The Bell Jar, which Plath had published under a pseudonym in England and which her mother did not want to be published in the U.S., in order to buy a third home. Where Plath is concerned, Hughes plays two roles that are hopelessly in conflict: he is both Plath's faithless husband and also her literary executor, so whenever a writer is denied access to Plath's papers, he or she can accuse Hughes of trying to cover...