TMA01 Part 2
Nominate your ideal dinner companion. This could be someone from the past or a contemporary, alive or dead, but who has an established reputation. What about this person’s reputation has impressed you?
I would like to sit down with Sylvia Plath and talk about the richness of her imagery and the breadth of her reading. Her writing, poetry as well as her journals, is full of obscure references and associations. I may have been too shy, but I would have liked to ask her how much her marriage to Ted Hughes bled through into her poems. In her journals, she described intense anxiety explained by Hughes as paranoia, which in retrospect seems to have been a cruel act of gaslighting. Sylvia Plath is almost entirely defined by The Bell Jar and her eventual suicide, but her journal reveals an intelligent person who thought deeply about the world and her place in it. Perhaps if we had had dinner she could have told me about the journals her husband destroyed after her death.