Emma added 'On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory'

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 10:23:26 -0700

Emma gave 5 stars to On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory (Hardcover) by Thomas Hertog

Emma is currently reading 'Trust'

Thu, 15 May 2025 22:44:21 -0700

Emma is currently reading Trust by Hernan Diaz

Emma added 'All Fours'

Tue, 13 May 2025 14:07:47 -0700

Emma gave 4 stars to All Fours (Hardcover) by Miranda July
My thoughts are a jumble. I’ll have to think about what to say besides, “What did I just read?”

Actual review:
I feel this book was a rallying cry to revolution. A metaphor in which the main character was a single avatar for an entire spectrum of perimenopausal and menopausal women’s personalities and experiences. She was too chaotic to feel real, but served to encompass those experiences all in one person. I appreciated the author writing about the subject matter: women in the “end phase“ of life in which our usefulness comes into question now that our breeding years are over. And one in which we start attending to our own needs simply because we have run out of fucks to give. (Is there a correlation there? You betcha.)

I also enjoyed the fact that I had literally no idea what was going to come next at any given paragraph. This woman writes fearlessly and I appreciate that.

The 4 star is only because the lightning-fast pace seemed to drop off a cliff towards the end, but other than that I highly recommend this book. It’s raw, crazy, sexy, and very real andsurrealistic at the same
time. It has to be experienced.

Emma wants to read 'The God of the Woods'

Sat, 10 May 2025 23:41:07 -0700

Emma wants to read The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

Emma is on page 264 of 336 of All Fours

Wed, 07 May 2025 21:55:47 -0700

Emma Scott is on page 264 of 336 of All Fours.
Emma wrote: This book is chaotic as hell and I’m not sure I’m in love anymore.

Emma started reading 'All Fours'

Tue, 22 Apr 2025 22:30:07 -0700

Emma started reading All Fours by Miranda July

Emma added 'Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath'

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 21:34:24 -0700

Emma gave 5 stars to Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Kindle Edition) by Heather Clark
Second read:
Still holds up. Her research is meticulous, letting the key players speak for themselves, inserting very little personal commentary. In this way, the story you come away wtih feels so organic and my hatred of TH my own, born of his own words and actions, and not because the author of this bio has an agenda.
But she does actually, and it's perfect: to not let SP's legacy languish as a suicide witch but as a genius who lived and (tried) to carve out her own art during a time of extreme sexism, societal upheaval, war, genocide, and threat of nuclear oblivion. This biography deserves all the accolades and I'm grateful to Heather Clark for choosing SP as her subject.

SP herself holds a special place in my heart and always will.

First read:
Wow. This book...

I'm a huge devotee of all things Sylvia. Since college, she seems to come in and out of my life in spans where I become hugely involved with her work. A few months ago was one of those times, where I had both her Letters and her Unabridged Journals open in my lap, going back and forth to try to get the full picture. (I eventually abandoned the letters because they were a sunshine-y front for the reality portrayed in her journals.) I then decided to embark upon a deep dive into poem analysis. No poetry scholar am I, but I had a good time marking up my copies of Ariel and Collected Poems with my own thoughts. As if I were trying to get closer to this incredible artist any way I could.

And then came Heather Clark's incredible biography. Clark--who IS a poetry scholar--has provided the ultimate synthesis between letters, journals, and poetry, so that we see Sylvia as a whole person, by her own words and remembrances of those who knew her best. Clark had read and interviewed every one of SP's surviving contemporaries to paint the most complete picture of the brilliant SP in all her facets--the good, the bad, and the ultra resilient--and to give us a clearer picture of her last, desperate days.

Notably absent from her acknowledgements is Frieda Hughes who has adopted a defensive stance with regard to SP history, likely to protect her father. And with good cause. It's clear Clark did her due diligence to try to remain impartial with regards to the drama of the SP/Ted Hughes mythology, letting the players speak their own lines instead of adding her speculation. The effect is a pretty stark confirmation that Ted Hughes didn't, up to his own death, take responsibility for his behavior.

To be clear, he's not responsible for SP's suicide. His betrayal, the coldest winter, caring alone for two small children, illness, the threat of being re-institutionalized when botched shock treatment from ten years before still haunted her...It all culminated in a perfect storm. As she wrote in Edge, her last poem,
We have come so far. It is over.

But TH was reckless and careless with SP's heart. His partner in life and art was suddenly reduced to a jailer who kept him imprisoned, as if she'd coerced the vows out of his mouth. Clark shares in detail the symbiotic relationship between SP and TH and gives him full credit for taking on childcare to let SP write in a time where that was unheard of. But his actions in the last six months of SP's life reveal a man who suddenly decided, upon meeting Assia Wevill--a married woman--that his entire 6 year marriage with SP was a constricting prison that had prevented him from creating. Never mind that she is the reason anyone knows who he is.

At face value, separated from SP, his poetry isn't all that good. "The Thought-Fox" is one of his best known works but I can't get past the juvenile title and the trite patness of the poem itself. Birthday Letters reads more like short essays, some banal, peppered with some pretty imagery. It was a bestseller when it came out in 1998 but honestly did anyone rush out to buy it because TH wrote it, or because the poems were about Sylvia? By his own words, he'd be fly fishing off a rock in Australia and not Poet Laureate if not for her diligence in getting him published. It's not overstating to say he owes her his career, but the second he lays eyes on Assia, his marriage to SP was forfeit and the life she helped build came crumbling down. In the last weeks of her life, he treats her poorly, dangling reconciliation in her face while taking on a second mistress at the same time.

TH didn't "murder" SP as some feminist poets attest, but his cavalier disregard for her pain (pain that he knew and wrote about and sold in the Birthday poems, where he tries to pin the bulk of her anguish on her father) speaks to a poor character. As does the fact he moved into SP's London flat with his pregnant mistress after SP had paid the rent for a year. Or how he blamed Mistress #2 for him potentially missing a phone call from SP in her last, desperate hours.

But to sum up Sylvia as merely reflections of the men in her life is to actually do her disservice. Clark avoids playing up the salacious and the dramatic, but reveals the woman in all her flawed glory, as genius driven to make something of herself in a time when women weren't expected to make more than dinner and babies. SP is inspiring and special, not because of her suicide or earlier attempt, but for what she endured up to that breaking point. The pressures society slammed down on her, and her own perfectionism that drove her so hard.

As Clark stated in her forward, her goal was to remove SP from the mythos of suicide and feminist icon, and portray her as a whole person, and she's succeeded marvelously. By letting the players in SP's life speak in their own words, the clearest and most definitive account of this remarkable artist's life has now been written. It incorporates every aspect of SP and adds insightful poetic analysis, as it's in her poetry wherein her true voice lies. SP's Ariel poems, as Clark illustrates, were not "about" TH or her father solely--to believe that is to give those men too much credit, and erase the misogynistic post-war, post-Holocaust, Cold War-threat-of-annihilation-world in which she lived and worked. She is raging against it all, scraping herself raw and doing it bravely, with cold-stiff fingers at 4am, before the babies wake.

I read the last few chapters with my heart in my throat, as they raced like the Ariel arrow, toward the suicidal eye of inevitability. I wanted to reach into the pages and pull SP out of that cold, snow-choked flat and put her on her Nauset beach, warm and sun-filled, so she might heal. She was only 30 years old. In the past, I'd been saddened by that loss of so many years' worth of her words and art. After closing Clark's book, I felt a kind of grief for the lost woman. Clark has elevated Sylvia Plath from icon, artist and poet, and showed her as a pure human being, who fought to rise out of the societal prisons that sought to trap her.

If she must be a myth, let her be Ariadne, laying down the threads, leading us out from the center of the labyrinth. Let us not desert her.

No, let's not desert her, but remember her for her mind, her talent, her art, and her resilience. Not for her final act. It was the period at the end of her sentence, not the beginning of her story.

Emma commented on Jamie's review of Birthday Letters

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 09:10:54 -0700

New comment on Jamie's review of Birthday Letters
by Ted Hughes

Agree on all counts. The poetry was weak imho, but moreover, he constantly paints himself the hapless victim, not only to Sylvia, but to the seductive wiles of his mistresses. They're always snaring him in their nets or casting spells or whatever. His utter lack of personal responsibility (and atrocious behavior pre and post SP's death) makes me see red, and this collection reads to me like a rebuttal to the hordes of righteously angry people who *do* want to scratch his name off her headstone. Trying to get the last word in. But any scholar of his actions knows better. Lovely review.

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