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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
She was probably gambling on, or putting her trust in, her knowledge that she had achieved what she had most wanted to artistically. The gamble there is in thinking that if you reach your goal everything is going to be OK. In fact, no, because you've got the wreckage of your life all around you still. She moved to London in December 1962, thinking that she could remake her life based on the weight of her understanding of her own success artistically. But in fact her life was still unresolved and her marriage had fallen apart, her internal psychological frailties were still there and were still going to haunt her. In one way, she was a victim of having too little external support, so you could also read the gamble there as being one where she took her interiority and showed her genius through that, but that this gave her very few resources externally to call on when she was at her most vulnerable.
The character that you've created is very isolated. She can't get a phone installed in her flat. She doesn't seem to have any friends. The people in London that she knows she doesn't like, and they don't like her. I imagine it must have been very difficult to write a book so much in this woman's head and in her moods. It must have been hard to live with that. It's a powerful personality and at the same time a very lonely, bleak one.
I'll tell you, living with Sylvia Plath in my head for three years felt, on one hand, like this incredible gift because of her brilliance and me being able to continually wallow in her work. Trying to imagine myself into her imagination was fantastic and yet it was also like having a stone on your head. Her incredible hypersensitivity to the workings of her mind and her awareness of the world around her was a gift, but it was also an unimaginable burden. To be that open to everything all the time, it's like doors of perception that never close.
Listen in on Laura Miller's conversation with Kate Moses
Yet as much as the novel is told from her perspective, there is a distance and awareness at some points that seems like it comes from you. There was a quality in the way the book depicts her rage and disappointment in her husband that suggests an understanding that it's too much.
I was trying to be really true and to be right there with her, but at the same time there was a certain level of observation from my point of view as the author. And judging from what she says about herself in the journals, she was acutely aware of her own reactions to things and often of her own unreliability. That was something that I wanted to portray, that in the moment she may not be aware of being irrational or malicious or just nasty, but on some level she always knew that was part of who she was. That was part of her struggle, trying to find out where all that stuff fit.
It was her, but at the same time it was ruining her life.
Right. If we go back to the idea that she may have been a victim of her own biochemistry in some ways, over and over again in her journals she says, why do I feel like this? I feel like I'm dying inside. Or, I feel like I'm inhabited by something that is just crushing me. She was aware that there was something going on in her and I don't think it was just personality. I think it was beyond that, but she didn't know what it was and she died not knowing what it was. That's one of the saddest things. Plath felt enormous responsibility for who she was and how she moved through the world. Certainly she felt that Ted Hughes had wronged her in unfathomable ways, unfathomable from her perspective. But at the same time, you can see in her poetry that she recognizes that there's culpability on both sides.
You're not only writing about a person for whom people have immensely complicated feelings but also about this marriage that's almost iconic. So much of the fascination with Plath and what happened to her is about this marriage and what happened in it. Did you feel hemmed in by all the different versions of it that have been put out there?
I certainly read everything, but from the start my feeling was that it is very easy to judge someone else's relationship. Really only the two people who were there know what happened, and usually even they don't know what's going on. I don't think either one of them had a sense during their marriage of the profundity of how they were affecting each other and what that would ultimately mean.
It's interesting to see how Ted Hughes grew after Plath's death. His work always seemed to circle back to a relationship between a man and a woman that was not entirely understandable to him. It's easy to speculate on what Plath would do with it now, since she's not around. But if she had been able to get some help and had not killed herself -- I mean, she was 30 years old, good God, when I think about what I was doing when I was 30, I cringe at the stupidity. And that's the tragedy here. They were so young and they both did such stupid stuff.
Ted Hughes chose, I think ingeniously, to develop a reputation for Plath after her death. He could clearly see from his relationship to her and what she did with their marriage in her work that the mythology of the marriage was so powerful that it was really worth allowing that to continue. As Plath's literary executor and the person who was getting public attention for her work, I think he very calculatedly used their marriage -- sometimes to his own personal damage -- in order to develop a mythology about her that would become as legendary as it clearly is. But there's a price to pay there, and clearly they both paid far too heavy a price.
