As Palavras e a Vida (2)

I was 20 when I got my hands on the newly published Unabridged Journals—a rep for Random House snuck me a free copy in my mailbox at Brookline Booksmith, the hip independent bookstore where I worked part-time while I studied literature and creative writing at Emerson College, downtown. I felt like I’d been given a bacon cheeseburger after a Lenten fast: 1982’s abridged journals were one-third the size of this chunky tome, with its chrome-tinted photograph of Plath at her Smith College graduation, smiling, looking off-camera, being handed a white carnation by a disembodied, feminine hand. Plath, the Real Plath, always elusive, was in here, I felt. So familiar was I with the abridged edition that I immediately knew where to look, based on the dates, to discover sections that had been mercilessly cut in the previous edition—to the point that many passages had made no sense at all. Why, for instance, did Plath meet Hughes one night at a party, bite him on the cheek when he kissed her, flee to Paris to see another boyfriend with barely a mention of Hughes’s name, and then marry him with no further commentary three months later? What had happened in between?

Emily Van Duyne, sublinhando o perturbador apagamento da vida de Sylvia Plath, aqui.