It is the beginning of December! T-Minus 23 days until Christmas! And time to choose a book for the month!
I recently watched Sylvia. A movie made in 2003, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0325055/). The movie is based on the letters between Sylvia Plath and her husband/poet Ted Hughes. It illustrates her struggles in writing, being Ted Hughes’ wife, along with her depression , insecurity, and ongoing desire to die. It was really difficult to watch this movie in its entirety, and to be quite honest it left me feeling a little unstable afterwards. This is because you are watching a seemingly fantastic and intelligent woman, with so much to offer, completely destroy herself with her own thoughts. It was and is tragic. Sylvia is definitely one of those haunting films that never quite leave you. With that said, I am glad I saw it once but will never feel the need to see it again.
As I was thinking about which book to read, I couldn’t let go of Sylvia Plath. It blows my mind that she finally wrote the novel she had been yearning for her whole life, and then decided to kill herself before she had the book published. I guess, as my own way of purging her out of my mind, I have decided to reread The Bell Jar. I originally read this book during my junior year of high school, when I was 16. Now, 7 years later, I have been reintroduced to Sylvia Plath and am excited to reread The Bell Jar and get her out of my mind!
Cheers!
Great book. I read it for a postmodern literature class in my last quarter of college. The class should have just been called "Writers and Suicide."
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