Bobby Underwood’s Reviews > Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath > Status Update

Maybe .. Maybe Not?

I think you have to adore her as I do to embark on this, because of the gargantuan page count. It will take me ages to get through it all. Bright and brilliant, tragic and misunderstood, her writings, poetry and journals are aching with loneliness and insight.

She is the only one I place with Cornell Woolrich and Robert Nathan in when I read them, I can often feel as much as read, because it is as though certain thoughts, passages, quatrains feel like they've been pulled from my own soul, my own heart, because they are things I feel also, and might have written (perhaps less elegantly) had they not beat me to it.

She really was a comet who should have been adored by someone, warts and all, nurtured. Instead the process of extracting her brilliance was tumultous, one of friction and competition.

"How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into."

"And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long."

"Wear your heart on your skin in this life."

“There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It's like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction--every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it's really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and excitement at about a million miles an hour.”

It is sad that she is remembered for one final desperate act, rather than for how wonderful she was, and could be.