Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark

 Hello my lovely readers!

Wow. What an exhaustive journey into the life of Sylvia Plath. An absolutely amazing tribute and celebration into her life. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath  by Heather Clark...let's get into it!

BACKGROUND
I purchased this book when I was in Tucson in December 2020 visiting my best friend, Alex. We've been friends since we were 15!

Since graduating from high school in 2007, we see each other every election year and 2020 was no different. (However, we did break that tradition in 2021 when I went to visit her and in 2022 when came to see me since she was my bridesmaid.) We were exploring downtown Tucson and of course, I found a bookstore, so you already know what happened. Three books and this happened to be one of them. 

I only knew about Sylvia Plath's death and that's it, so I decided to buy this book to get an in-depth view of who she was.

SUMMARY
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. She's credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry. But for all of her accomplishments, her struggles with her mental health, role as a wife and mother and ultimately, the manner in which she killed herself are what usually overrides her legacy.

“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. She was, in the words of a close friend, “operatic” in her desires, a “Renaissance woman” molded as much by Romantic sublimity as New England stoicism.5 She was as fluent in Nietzsche as she was in Emerson; as much in thrall to Yeats’s gongs and gyres as Frost’s silences and snow.”

Clark explores Sylvia's world from her early relationships to her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental health industry to her marriage woes.

This isn't the first biography on Sylvia Plath, but it is the first that takes advantage of a wealth of new material and is a balanced, comprehensive and definitive view on the life of this great and tragic poet.

MY THOUGHTS
Going into this book, I was unsure what to expect. I knew how Sylvia died. I had read The Bell Jar a few years ago and wasn't that impressed with it. I had watched the movie Sylvia  starring Gwyneth Paltrow in the titular role...but I still didn't really know anything about her.

This biography was completely un-biased. Clark used letters, calendars, interviews and everything else in between to provide a full circle view of who Sylvia was. She didn't give any kind of slant to her and I appreciated that.

For two weeks, I was sucked into the world of Sylvia and her thoughts and life in Wellesley, Smith College and Devon, England and I think I'm a better woman for it. Absolutely brilliant biography. It only makes me wonder what her life would be had she lived to her 50s, 60s, and 70s.