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A review by rebeccamahanyhorton
Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 by Elizabeth Winder
2.0
Pretentiously written and incomprehensibly organized.
The bulk of the book suffers from a writing style that attempts to compete with Plath's in poeticism; the rest, which catalogues the remainder of Plath's life, is a little better in that it strays from the sort of unfounded suppositions that characterize the majority of the book. (The author on Plath's love of starfish: "Perhaps she saw her own appetites in the creature's 'active search for and ingestion of animal food, dead or alive, in large portions.'")
It was worth reading only because of the subject matter, in the end.
The bulk of the book suffers from a writing style that attempts to compete with Plath's in poeticism; the rest, which catalogues the remainder of Plath's life, is a little better in that it strays from the sort of unfounded suppositions that characterize the majority of the book. (The author on Plath's love of starfish: "Perhaps she saw her own appetites in the creature's 'active search for and ingestion of animal food, dead or alive, in large portions.'")
It was worth reading only because of the subject matter, in the end.