Name: Pain, Parties, Work
ISBN: 9780062085498

Elizabeth Winder

A biography marking the fiftieth anniversary of Sylvia Plath's death captures a moment in time--the month she spent in New York City in June 1953 as a guest editor for the annual college issue of "Mademoiselle" magazine.

Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953

Pain, Parties, Work

"That if you stand still for a moment the world keeps moving, that sometimes no head will turn despite shiny hair and freshly applied lipstick. That many of your peers will want less than you, and that you will envy them for that."

This book follows in greatly detailed short chapters/vignettes June 1953, the month Sylvia Plath lived in New York City and was one of twenty guest editors chosen to work on the college issue of Mademoiselle. It follows social interactions, dates, outfits, shopping trips, lunches, meetings, assignments, food poisoning, conversations, everything that happened in that exact time period. It also tells us about Plath's childhood and adolescence, the months that followed her time in New York including her suicide attempt a bit about her later marriage and eventual suicide but mainly we get to know 20-year-old Sylvia, ambitious and anxious and pressured Sylvia, confused about her future Sylvia who methodically plans out her outfits and enjoys fashion and beauty but who is drawn to more serious literary pursuits, pegged there by her own already very apparent talents; we see one girl and so many girls then, all at once.

The book jumps around and does not read only in a chronological order, giving us just the necessary facts and quotations to give us a story, no, we get the feeling of what it's like to be Sylvia, what it's like to be a fastidious and disciplined but also occasionally wild girl, a girl who told her mother upon hearing of her father's death that she would never speak to God again, who instead became one with the sea, the ocean, the sun, who was not nearly as distant or pristine as her then reputation or history's Smith girl portrait of her seems to tell: she was all senses and thus, an all new poet. We get lists of her boyfriends, her favorite shampoo brands, lipstick, phobias, all the things from her journal, all the things from a real life lived. She was a genius but what really makes her work seem even more important, more huge, is that she was just like any other girl, a fact often repeated by her fellow guest editors at Mademoiselle.

It's weird to think that I have felt like Plath before. I haven't wanted to crawl under my house and take a bottle of sleeping pills but I have felt the pressure to be perfect, to be successful, to do everything right and get what you want only to feel like an impostor, as if you don't deserve the things you have worked for. I have felt things so deeply, in such a powerful way that I can't imagine how I'll survive the next instant. I have felt so depressed that nothing seems real. This is mental illness, this is anxiety, this is societal pressure, this is pressure from loved ones, from ourselves. It's a lot of things that go into being who you are, especially being a woman, and although not entirely to that extent, something felt by most of the women in the Mademoiselle program, especially in 1953. Figuring out a way to find out who you are, to become whoever it is you are, was difficult and if you want to be all things, a wife, mother, a person with a career, well, it was damn near impossible then, especially when not all of those choices were considered the right one. We can have it all, or attempt to now, but it's still so fucking hard. 

This book is beautiful belongs to the earth with its descriptions of food and clothes and smells and bodies and lipstick. It has a substance you can taste, creating the kinds of memories you still have from teenage summers. Sylvia isn't a victim or hero or symbol, she's just a girl and this is a rush of memory, of senses, of time, of life floating right over you and through you. It's feminine in the way the coppery taste of licking a paper cut is: pungent, metallic, shimmering.

Pain, Parties, Work Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953

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