New Yorker staff writers pick their 2022 beach reads.
I bought Heather Clark’s “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath” last winter, by which point it had appeared on year-end lists and was a Pulitzer finalist. I’ve wanted to dive in ever since but just couldn’t find the right moment to leap headlong into its eleven hundred and fifty-two pages. Then summer rolled around, and I found myself craving a smart book I could live in for months—the literary equivalent of a bottomless Negroni.
“Red Comet” is not the first Plath biography I’ve read. My first was actually a 1994 meta-biography called “The New Yorker , is about the fact that nobody had ever written a truly great Plath study, as the task presents a thicket of competing interests, family resentments, and obstructionist estate intervention. After Plath’s suicide, in 1963, her husband, Ted Hughes, from whom she was separated at the time, and Hughes’s sister Olwyn managed her archive and her legacy, and as such any scholar wanting to write a Plath biography had to go through them in order to get permission to use the materials.
What Clark has accomplished is staggering: she manages to put Plath’s story back into the context of her life, rather than through her fights with Hughes or the tragic mythology swirling around her death. The book is urgent and alive and provocative and confident—which is exactly how Plath’s poetry feels. In the introduction, Clark writes, of Plath, “She was determined to live as fully as possible—to write, to travel, to cook, to draw, to love as much and as often as she could.
When I come to the end of “Red Comet,” it will feel like the end of a beautiful trip away, and I am not ready to go home yet. Fortunately, there are always Plath’s books to read—or to listen to. My other summer suggestion? Download Maggie Gyllenhaal reading “
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