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Burnt Diaries
This title is Emma Tennant's memoir set mostly during the 70s, in which she shares the experience of her affair with Ted Hughes while she was editor of the literary magazine "Bananas". She offers perceptions of the writers who contributed to her magazine, including Angela Carter and J.G. Ballard.
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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About the author
Emma Tennant
93 books37 followersSince the early 1970s, when she was in her mid-thirties, Emma Tennant has been a prolific novelist and has established herself as one of the leading British exponents of "new fiction." This does not mean that she is an imitator of either the French nouveaux romanciers or the American post-modernists, although her work reveals an indebtedness to the methods and preoccupations of some of the latter. Like them, she employs parody and rewriting, is interested in the fictiveness of fiction, appropriates some science-fiction conventions, and exploits the possibilities of generic dislocation and mutation, especially the blending of realism and fantasy. Yet, although parallels can be cited and influences suggested, her work is strongly individual, the product of an intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, attempt to create an original type of highly imaginative fiction.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 8, 2022
The third of three memoiristic accounts by Scottish author and editor Emma Tennant was for me the most compelling. Laced with wry humour, it’s more focused and lucid than her earlier writings. It’s structured like a diary, opening in the early 1970s in London’s Notting Hill. Once a rundown, low-rent area that became a haven for excluded Black immigrants, many part of the Windrush generation, Notting Hill is fast becoming colonised by the white, radical-chic, literati. Tennant’s neighbours range from bemused locals to a cabal of SF writers headed up by Michael Moorcock. It’s now that she sets up her fringe literary magazine Bananas which became a showcase for experimental writers and new forms of literature featuring, among a host of others, J. G. Ballard, Ian McEwan, Russell Hoban, Adam Mars-Jones and Tennant’s close friend Angela Carter. Although the magazine also boasted writers from Russia and America, as well as more established British authors including Ted Hughes.
Tennant details the everyday workings of the magazine, her friendships with historian Antonia Fraser and writer Caroline Blackwood - still recovering from her disastrous relationship with American poet Robert Lowell. There are vignettes of awkward dinner parties with Warhol, and chance encounters with Philip Roth. Roth, like McEwan, seems to Tennant yet another in a long list of male writers who liked to dabble in portraits of dead and inanimate women. Yet despite an impression of feminist hackles being raised by men like these, Tennant's inexplicably drawn to Hughes, supposedly happily married to Carol at the time. And it’s her all-consuming affair with Hughes that comes to dominate her account.
Tennant’s clearly aware of Hughes’s past and his sinister reputation where women are concerned but claims she feels the pull, of what she dubs, the Bluebeard/Mr Rochester syndrome. Her account of their affair sometimes makes for bizarre reading, peppered with odd attempts to both romanticise and justify her actions. Hughes is more definite, telling her he wants her for no more than a year, which leads to a series of encounters in cluttered rooms and seedy hotels, interspersed with the kind of fine dining Hughes insisted upon.
Hughes takes on near-mythic status in Tennant’s imagination, and her descriptions of him match this, overblown, filled with extravagant symbols and metaphors, both incredibly frank and painfully self-deluding. Hughes is an intimidating, contradictory figure, obsessed with the occult, sometimes prone to violent gestures, carefully policed by his sister Olwyn. He seems sybaritic and sadistic, pausing his relationship with Tennant by bringing his latest, much-younger lover, to a party at Tennant’s house. Although his cruelty is so casual, so lacking in a sense of anyone except himself, he also thinks nothing of then inviting Tennant to the new woman’s home for drinks, and later to lunch with his sister and his children with Plath, Frieda and Nicholas. Tennant, it turns out, is not discarded, just on hold or maybe held in reserve. Tennant's insider portrait of literary London’s a fascinating one. And, for anyone interested in Plath and/or Hughes, Tennant's account of her time with Hughes may be strange and strained but it’s also completely gripping – like watching a disaster movie play out in slow motion.
Rating: 3.5
Tennant details the everyday workings of the magazine, her friendships with historian Antonia Fraser and writer Caroline Blackwood - still recovering from her disastrous relationship with American poet Robert Lowell. There are vignettes of awkward dinner parties with Warhol, and chance encounters with Philip Roth. Roth, like McEwan, seems to Tennant yet another in a long list of male writers who liked to dabble in portraits of dead and inanimate women. Yet despite an impression of feminist hackles being raised by men like these, Tennant's inexplicably drawn to Hughes, supposedly happily married to Carol at the time. And it’s her all-consuming affair with Hughes that comes to dominate her account.
Tennant’s clearly aware of Hughes’s past and his sinister reputation where women are concerned but claims she feels the pull, of what she dubs, the Bluebeard/Mr Rochester syndrome. Her account of their affair sometimes makes for bizarre reading, peppered with odd attempts to both romanticise and justify her actions. Hughes is more definite, telling her he wants her for no more than a year, which leads to a series of encounters in cluttered rooms and seedy hotels, interspersed with the kind of fine dining Hughes insisted upon.
Hughes takes on near-mythic status in Tennant’s imagination, and her descriptions of him match this, overblown, filled with extravagant symbols and metaphors, both incredibly frank and painfully self-deluding. Hughes is an intimidating, contradictory figure, obsessed with the occult, sometimes prone to violent gestures, carefully policed by his sister Olwyn. He seems sybaritic and sadistic, pausing his relationship with Tennant by bringing his latest, much-younger lover, to a party at Tennant’s house. Although his cruelty is so casual, so lacking in a sense of anyone except himself, he also thinks nothing of then inviting Tennant to the new woman’s home for drinks, and later to lunch with his sister and his children with Plath, Frieda and Nicholas. Tennant, it turns out, is not discarded, just on hold or maybe held in reserve. Tennant's insider portrait of literary London’s a fascinating one. And, for anyone interested in Plath and/or Hughes, Tennant's account of her time with Hughes may be strange and strained but it’s also completely gripping – like watching a disaster movie play out in slow motion.
Rating: 3.5
August 21, 2008
This book infuriated me like no other. I can imagine every friend that truly loved Princess Diana (or any other famous person) would be left with the same feeling of theft as I did on reading this book. She calls it “Burnt Diaries” and tries to turn the book into a diary – though it was clearly written with hindsight. It has the lay-out of a diary, but is a betrayal, because no clear dates could be pinned to the events she describes. I don’t want to ignore the fact that Ted Hughes could well have fallen in love with her, but that she is like one of the vultures (another “Paul Burrell”?), he describes in “Birthday Letters” goes without saying “The dogs are eating your mother” (Hughes 1998: 195, extract):
For vultures
To take back into the sun. Imagine
These bone-crushing mouths the mouths
That labour for the beetle
Who will roll her back into the sun.
Why did Tennant decide to use such an incendiary title for her book? Because she wanted to cash in on her “knowledge” – though there clearly is none, as she alludes on page 146: “... my desire to learn what ‘really happened’ in the past has obliterated even the rudiments of good behaviour”. If she really loved him, she wouldn’t be digging for truths from the past, she would be able to enjoy him for what he is and stop trying to turn herself into Plath. The latter she puts down to gossip on page 166, “… thinks she’s Sylvia Plath”, though I hold in my hand a 230-page document attesting to the truth of that kind of gossip!
Her bone-crushing pen writhes forth in myth, for not only does she try to own what does not belong to her in the female realm, she tries to be Hughes too! When I first read her reference about the fox (page 155), I thought it was coincidental. By the time I reached the end of the book, I’d realized she’d already read “Epiphany” (Hughes 1998: 113) and had appropriated this as well. She writes that Ted had told her: “Did you know I nearly brought you one [a fox] up from Devonshire the other day?” Who would he have been referring to? Sylvia? Tennant?
Reading this book is like groping your way through the dark, because there are clearly so many omissions. One example is her questions (let’s say to “dear Diary”) as to what Ted wants from her, and why he seems to be pursuing her. If it was really bothering her, she could’ve asked him that at the time. If it was truly bothering her that she was an infidel to the marriage between Ted and Carol, she wouldn’t have allowed anything to happen between them … surely? Or was she so flattered by the thought that he was after her and saw the possibilities (in £) open up before her that she couldn’t say ‘no’?
Tennant could find nothing in Ted’s hearth but ashes. He did not want to talk about Sylvia (page 154) because he knew it would by mythologized one way or the other. She tells of another meal she had with the poet laureate where he talks about “a poem by Burns As I came over Windy Gap”. Hughes corrects himself laughingly that that was actually by Yeats – but is it not Tennant that is burning? Her fingers and mouth afire as she threads fact with fiction for the sake of money? Her list of books, amongst which two fictional recreations of the marriage between the two poets, “Sylvia and Ted” (2001) and “The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted” (2001) attests to this.
The explosive in the flames was her poke at the end: “Maybe because I write of Ted – … with a freedom I hadn’t expected to come”. As if she cannot pen anything original, for these words were taken from Ted too. He was never keen on writing about Plath (for whatever reasons), but when he finally did and the book came out in the form of “Birthday Letters” and "Howls and Whispers" he felt at peace. A peace that Tennant could clearly not enjoy. She needed to throw stones into that tranquillity. Here, a burnt diary worth burning, for: “... it’s hard to say afterwards what coincidences and correspondences were ‘real’ and what were imagined ...” (2000: 98).
For vultures
To take back into the sun. Imagine
These bone-crushing mouths the mouths
That labour for the beetle
Who will roll her back into the sun.
Why did Tennant decide to use such an incendiary title for her book? Because she wanted to cash in on her “knowledge” – though there clearly is none, as she alludes on page 146: “... my desire to learn what ‘really happened’ in the past has obliterated even the rudiments of good behaviour”. If she really loved him, she wouldn’t be digging for truths from the past, she would be able to enjoy him for what he is and stop trying to turn herself into Plath. The latter she puts down to gossip on page 166, “… thinks she’s Sylvia Plath”, though I hold in my hand a 230-page document attesting to the truth of that kind of gossip!
Her bone-crushing pen writhes forth in myth, for not only does she try to own what does not belong to her in the female realm, she tries to be Hughes too! When I first read her reference about the fox (page 155), I thought it was coincidental. By the time I reached the end of the book, I’d realized she’d already read “Epiphany” (Hughes 1998: 113) and had appropriated this as well. She writes that Ted had told her: “Did you know I nearly brought you one [a fox] up from Devonshire the other day?” Who would he have been referring to? Sylvia? Tennant?
Reading this book is like groping your way through the dark, because there are clearly so many omissions. One example is her questions (let’s say to “dear Diary”) as to what Ted wants from her, and why he seems to be pursuing her. If it was really bothering her, she could’ve asked him that at the time. If it was truly bothering her that she was an infidel to the marriage between Ted and Carol, she wouldn’t have allowed anything to happen between them … surely? Or was she so flattered by the thought that he was after her and saw the possibilities (in £) open up before her that she couldn’t say ‘no’?
Tennant could find nothing in Ted’s hearth but ashes. He did not want to talk about Sylvia (page 154) because he knew it would by mythologized one way or the other. She tells of another meal she had with the poet laureate where he talks about “a poem by Burns As I came over Windy Gap”. Hughes corrects himself laughingly that that was actually by Yeats – but is it not Tennant that is burning? Her fingers and mouth afire as she threads fact with fiction for the sake of money? Her list of books, amongst which two fictional recreations of the marriage between the two poets, “Sylvia and Ted” (2001) and “The Ballad of Sylvia and Ted” (2001) attests to this.
The explosive in the flames was her poke at the end: “Maybe because I write of Ted – … with a freedom I hadn’t expected to come”. As if she cannot pen anything original, for these words were taken from Ted too. He was never keen on writing about Plath (for whatever reasons), but when he finally did and the book came out in the form of “Birthday Letters” and "Howls and Whispers" he felt at peace. A peace that Tennant could clearly not enjoy. She needed to throw stones into that tranquillity. Here, a burnt diary worth burning, for: “... it’s hard to say afterwards what coincidences and correspondences were ‘real’ and what were imagined ...” (2000: 98).
February 5, 2009
A truly, truly, TERRIBLE book. Exceeded only in its awfulness by the dreadful 'novel' she wrote about Plath and Hughes.
January 20, 2010
"After Ted explained metaphor to me, I find I am in the wide bed with the grubby sheets." My, this is an embarrassing book. For Ted is Ted Hughes, whom Emma Tennant loved in the 70s, yet the life he lived and the way he treated Emma, and all women, is not his alone. His noble Aztec head, but speaking, all too often, my words: "I want you for no more than one year." "We did harm," of another woman. Or the neverfailing, quietly spoken, "come back to my frosty flat." Or "next year - we shall go to Scotland. It is the one country I must learn."
Of course, the virtue of this book, written by Emma Tennant at 58 years young about when she was 38-40 years old, is that it gives the phenomenology of how it feels to be the kind of woman who is drawn in to the web of feeling and genius of certain men - a phenomenology that it had frankly never occurred to me to wonder about.
It just happens, I thought. But it doesn't. Emma Tennant, then the editor of a 60s-hangover literary magazine published in 1970s Notting Hill, Bananas, was obsessed with Sylvia Plath, saw her fate as conjoined with hers. And depsite the fevered quality of some of the writing, which struck me at first as a kind of joke, she manages to skewer others, if not Ted. Phillip Roth, dining by himself at a restuarant, like an anteater staring down his long nose with his bright eyes focused entirely on his food. But Emma and Caroline Blackwood, Mrs. Robert Lowell, had to be careful at a nearby table, because Roth's hearing was acute, and anything he heard went through his ears into his quill-shaped head, with black-haired feathers sticking out, waiting to be inscribed on stone tablets.
Anyway, it all ends badly, except of course for the men - even tragically - and the book, which is written in the form of contemporaneous journal entries (though it can't have been because it seems phony and constructed) merges with the diaries of Sylvia Plath of which Hughes was thought to have made a holocaust.
Still - what a narrow escape Ted had - and how many of them! And one can't feel sorry for Emma, becuase she enjoyed every minute - perhaps more than he did, poor guy.
Of course, the virtue of this book, written by Emma Tennant at 58 years young about when she was 38-40 years old, is that it gives the phenomenology of how it feels to be the kind of woman who is drawn in to the web of feeling and genius of certain men - a phenomenology that it had frankly never occurred to me to wonder about.
It just happens, I thought. But it doesn't. Emma Tennant, then the editor of a 60s-hangover literary magazine published in 1970s Notting Hill, Bananas, was obsessed with Sylvia Plath, saw her fate as conjoined with hers. And depsite the fevered quality of some of the writing, which struck me at first as a kind of joke, she manages to skewer others, if not Ted. Phillip Roth, dining by himself at a restuarant, like an anteater staring down his long nose with his bright eyes focused entirely on his food. But Emma and Caroline Blackwood, Mrs. Robert Lowell, had to be careful at a nearby table, because Roth's hearing was acute, and anything he heard went through his ears into his quill-shaped head, with black-haired feathers sticking out, waiting to be inscribed on stone tablets.
Anyway, it all ends badly, except of course for the men - even tragically - and the book, which is written in the form of contemporaneous journal entries (though it can't have been because it seems phony and constructed) merges with the diaries of Sylvia Plath of which Hughes was thought to have made a holocaust.
Still - what a narrow escape Ted had - and how many of them! And one can't feel sorry for Emma, becuase she enjoyed every minute - perhaps more than he did, poor guy.
August 9, 2022
This was really good, better than expected. I got it really for her story of the relationship with Hughes in the 70s. But its so much more than that. Really interesting to hear of life in bohemian Notting Hill in the 70s, starting the Bananas literary magazine. So many writers encountered: Roth, Angela Carter, JG Ballard, Heathcote Williams, Bruce Chatwin...and Angela Carter shows up at one point at a party with one of her promising creative writing students. Only Kazuo Ishiguro! Lots of literary gossip.
September 25, 2024
This is a peculiarly selective memoir. Most of it covers events from the Spring of 1973 when Emma Tennant founded and edited the literary magazine called Bananas at the age of 35. In 1976 she met Ted Hughes and had a brief affair with him. It was over by the Autumn of 1979 when she was 42.
Her feelings about Ted are obviously very deep but the accounts of their meetings are spare, fragmentary, elliptical. They were both in other relationships. They both had children living with them. Their motives are unclear even to themselves, although Ted seems clearer about what he wants. He breaks off and resumes contact seemingly on a whim. He tells her he can only give her a year.
Emma keeps trying to pump him for information on Sylvia Plath. ‘Don’t talk about Sylvia,’ he warns.
She knows his history. About Sylvia who killed herself but made sure her children didn’t die. About Assia who killed both herself and her child in an almost copycat suicide. She meets his current wife, Carol, and his children by Sylvia. She even meets his other mistress, Sally, who has followed him from Australia and who, he casually conjectures, will go back again within a year, leaving him more free to spend time with Emma, who fascinates him because of her connection with the rugged landscape of Scotland.
He introduces her to the occult but she doesn’t seem interested at all. She is too much under the spell of the man himself to dabble in any other kind of magic.
Her own personality seems eviscerated by him. She describes watching him fillet a fish in a restaurant after telling her they’ll go together to Scotland. She finds it impossible to contradict him.
This is not a joyous memoir. It is shot through with sadness, nostalgia and unfulfilled longing.
It is bolstered by casual references to parties, alcohol, famous acquaintances and literary friends. The names are dropped liberally throughout but we learn little of the people behind them.
I was at university in the 70s. The names were mostly familiar to me. Every woman I knew had a copy of The Bell Jar. I knew the stories of Ian McEwan, John Sladek and Michael Moorcock. Gaudete was a set text on my course the year it was published. One of my friends had a letter from Ted Hughes. It was like having a letter from God. Another friend had been on a train to Manchester with “Jim” Ballard. I was being taught by the people who'd taught Angela Carter. So I quite enjoyed the name dropping. But I imagine this memoir appears very thin and uninteresting to someone who is not already familiar with the literary background.
The last 20 pages compress what she calls the “years of ill fortune” and accelerate to 1998 when Ted Hughes had his greatest triumphs with his translation of Ovid and Birthday Letters. After he has died a friend says Ted talked about her to him. “Ted said you were going to go off together,” he tells her.
Why does she add this? Because she never really believed it before but now she does? Because she wants us to know she really was important to him? Because she finds it consoling? Validating?
With a memoir you are never really sure what is true, what is omitted, what is mis-remembered. It is one person’s memory. Here the memories are overlaid with the author’s questing curiosity about Sylvia Plath. One of Sylvia’s journals was allegedly destroyed by Ted. Another disappeared. “I never discovered the secret I always felt he nursed within,” Emma concludes, wistfully, as she watches Birthday Letters jump to the top of the bestseller charts.
It’s a moving account of an intimate relationship with a very private public figure. I enjoyed it a lot. It has prompted me to re-read the poems. Unfortunately I lost my first edition of Birthday Letters with its stunning red cover painted by Ted and Sylvia’s daughter, Frieda. I’ve only got the blue-grey paperback. But even that is a very precious jewel.
Her feelings about Ted are obviously very deep but the accounts of their meetings are spare, fragmentary, elliptical. They were both in other relationships. They both had children living with them. Their motives are unclear even to themselves, although Ted seems clearer about what he wants. He breaks off and resumes contact seemingly on a whim. He tells her he can only give her a year.
Emma keeps trying to pump him for information on Sylvia Plath. ‘Don’t talk about Sylvia,’ he warns.
She knows his history. About Sylvia who killed herself but made sure her children didn’t die. About Assia who killed both herself and her child in an almost copycat suicide. She meets his current wife, Carol, and his children by Sylvia. She even meets his other mistress, Sally, who has followed him from Australia and who, he casually conjectures, will go back again within a year, leaving him more free to spend time with Emma, who fascinates him because of her connection with the rugged landscape of Scotland.
He introduces her to the occult but she doesn’t seem interested at all. She is too much under the spell of the man himself to dabble in any other kind of magic.
Her own personality seems eviscerated by him. She describes watching him fillet a fish in a restaurant after telling her they’ll go together to Scotland. She finds it impossible to contradict him.
“I sit, feeling that my own backbone has been removed, staring at the pale-pink flesh of the fish and thinking of the River Tweed where I grew up.”
This is not a joyous memoir. It is shot through with sadness, nostalgia and unfulfilled longing.
It is bolstered by casual references to parties, alcohol, famous acquaintances and literary friends. The names are dropped liberally throughout but we learn little of the people behind them.
I was at university in the 70s. The names were mostly familiar to me. Every woman I knew had a copy of The Bell Jar. I knew the stories of Ian McEwan, John Sladek and Michael Moorcock. Gaudete was a set text on my course the year it was published. One of my friends had a letter from Ted Hughes. It was like having a letter from God. Another friend had been on a train to Manchester with “Jim” Ballard. I was being taught by the people who'd taught Angela Carter. So I quite enjoyed the name dropping. But I imagine this memoir appears very thin and uninteresting to someone who is not already familiar with the literary background.
The last 20 pages compress what she calls the “years of ill fortune” and accelerate to 1998 when Ted Hughes had his greatest triumphs with his translation of Ovid and Birthday Letters. After he has died a friend says Ted talked about her to him. “Ted said you were going to go off together,” he tells her.
Why does she add this? Because she never really believed it before but now she does? Because she wants us to know she really was important to him? Because she finds it consoling? Validating?
With a memoir you are never really sure what is true, what is omitted, what is mis-remembered. It is one person’s memory. Here the memories are overlaid with the author’s questing curiosity about Sylvia Plath. One of Sylvia’s journals was allegedly destroyed by Ted. Another disappeared. “I never discovered the secret I always felt he nursed within,” Emma concludes, wistfully, as she watches Birthday Letters jump to the top of the bestseller charts.
It’s a moving account of an intimate relationship with a very private public figure. I enjoyed it a lot. It has prompted me to re-read the poems. Unfortunately I lost my first edition of Birthday Letters with its stunning red cover painted by Ted and Sylvia’s daughter, Frieda. I’ve only got the blue-grey paperback. But even that is a very precious jewel.
July 1, 2024
This book is a memoir, in diary format, of a period in the mid to late 1970s when the author Emma Tennant founded an avant-garde literary journal, 'Bananas'. It opens as she moves to Notting Hill - 'Wham!' Thus it begins, with no back-story at all, so that I felt left behind from the start. Perhaps I should have read her earlier memoir, 'Girlitude', first to better understand the author's past. We immediately meet the cast of authors who will populate her journal's pages: JG Ballard, Bruce Chatwin, Michael Moorcock, John Sladek, Philip Roth, Angela Carter... The incisive pen portraits of each admits a glance of recognition, but nothing more. We never get to know any of these characters. From the anecdotal - descriptions of a high-spirited escapade to her family home in Scotland and the Bohemian environs of the journal's offices - the memoir lurches to confessional as the author meets Ted Hughes, already notorious, and begins an affair with him. The rest of the book charts this brief but intense relationship with startling honesty, and we feel, like the author, the difficulties of really knowing another person even as you become intimate, questioning their motives and grappling with the ghosts of their past. The obsessive and painful nature of such an affair is well drawn in spare prose. But somehow the diary format, which allowed the prose to skip forward in seasons, left me feeling that I had only glimpsed a few snapshots of a life, many characters remaining silhouettes.
January 17, 2025
We heard all about Birthday Letters but not this that came out around the same time. I read it as I was interested in the literary journal Bananas but then passed this along with Tennant's Sylvia & Ted straight over to my friend's reading group for abused women. They lapped it up and learnt a lot about all the signs to watch out for. I met Ted Hughes in Cambridge in the late '70s and I didn't take to him or his work, good instincts! 'A' level students should be reading these books rather than The Bell Jar to give them survival tools out in the big bad world.
October 25, 2020
I found this in many ways a fascinating memoir especially Tennant’s relationship with Ted Hughes, the poetic colossus of the day and also the depiction of bohemian life with peppers in Notting Hill where rotting cabbages nudged Indian caftans and Tiffany lamps on the week;y barrows
December 3, 2021
“Don’t talk about Sylvia.”
August 10, 2009
Clearly the interest in these diary entries is Tennant's affair with Ted Hughes. I'd been aware of it but assumed their relationship was between his marriages. Learning this wasn't true, I wondered what motivated her to reveal it. The book was published the year following his death. I asked myself if she were publishing a juicy and profitable expose. In the end, because she continued entries about Hughes almost 2 decades after the affair ended and wrote a moving account of his memorial and his place in English letters, I decided the book was mostly a caring portrait of the man. Her intentions, I came to believe, were purer than I'd originally thought. The entries themselves are marked by a self-consciousness, as if she notes her time with Hughes with a novelist's eye, knowing she's going to prepare it for publication. Her interpretation of Hughes is interesting. I admired her piling layer upon layer of portraiture to present him as a force of nature, a picture he would have liked. In fact, Tennant writes, he believed himself like the salmon, possessed by no one, outwitting nature itself, and avoiding all the social ties he could. While reading Burnt Diaries I was also rereading Hughes's Birthday Letters, his late poems about Plath, and feel I'm seeing someone more sensitive and caring than Tennant did. Earlier in the year I also read the Hughes letters without seeing Tennant's Hughes. But he mistreated her, and someone in a difficult relationship woluld see it with a particular intensity.
August 24, 2012
Still pining for Ted, eh?
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews