I found a precedent for girls like me in the work of confessional poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. They represented a respectable compromise between “real literature” and my irrepressible tendency to let the personal creep into my writing. I related intensely to the ferocity and focus in their work, but I soon felt the hinges of a trap closing around me. To identify with Plath and Sexton was to take up the mantle of the mad female poet, madness being what they were chiefly remembered for. Hemingway’s suicide was just a footnote to his biography; Plath and Sexton’s suicides defined them. I wanted more for myself, as a person and an artist. But there were a limited number of luminaries that a young writer in a university English department could safely emulate and still be considered mature and serious about their craft. Plath and Sexton had blazed a trail I felt I could follow. So I began to grapple with women’s “madness”, as both a personal and a literary conceit, trying to discover why it both allured and repelled me.
The Unified Theory of Ophelia: On Women, Writing, and Mental Illness
