After spending five days reading her diaries, I saw anxiety, love, pain, and grief in nearly six hundred pages.

The diaries are full of drama, intense emotions, and passion.

They reveal the unstable mental state of Sylvia.

Sylvia Plath is a famous American poet and novelist who suffered from a mental illness, bipolar disorder.

In one of her poems, Sylvia says: "Death is a art like everything else. And it is an art, I do it exceptionally well."

Therefore, she chose to end her life in this strange way, by putting her head in the gas oven to die by asphyxiation!!

In her diaries, her struggle with life is portrayed.

With bouts of depression.

With her hatred for her mother and the loss of her father, with time and the attempt to write poems, with the newspapers and the role of publication that rejects her works..!

"Oh my God; Is this then all there is, this going and returning through a passage of laughter and tears? Of self-worship and self-loathing? Of glory and disgrace?"

"The present is eternity, and eternity is always change, flow, eruption. This moment is life. And when it passes, it dies. But you cannot start over again in every moment. The great moment, the incandescent flash, comes and goes."

Her diaries end with the word "Note". She committed suicide in her apartment on February 11, 1963.

How bad and sad what she did, I thought of her child who was one year old, how he would spend the rest of his life without her. When he reads his mother's poems and feels the grief in her writings, he will surely console himself by reading these diaries to feel her presence with him as I did.

The truth is that I finished reading these diaries, but they did not finish with me..!

I have never read any book for such a long time in my life. However, the difficulty was by no means the volume of "The Journals", but rather the large number of paragraphs that required time and proper consideration. The initial entries mainly consisted of reflections on the choice of that one "right" life path, descriptions of Sylvia Plath's love adventures and her great ambitions. The further into the text, the more we focus on writing, which at a certain point turns into an obsession of the author. Thus, we get huge walls of text filled with descriptions of ordinary objects, sketches of never-completed novels, long lists of names that Plath wanted to give to the characters in her subsequent texts. It is easy to be thrilled by this book, but it is also easy to feel tired. However, Plath's writing skills are astonishing, especially considering that these were her private notes created at a time when she was not yet famous.

Who should give this book a try? Firstly, those who expect to find in it sensations related to the author's numerous suicide attempts or the breakdown of her marriage. Surprisingly, there are very few potentially controversial topics in this book. Instead, there is a great deal of feminism and rarely found sensitivity. And who will like it the most? Those who would like to look into the mind of one of the best and at the same time most mysterious female writers of the past century and those who will be able to understand her need for compulsive writing about everything, even about what may seem insignificant.

In reading this book,

Just reading one page of the translator's preface is enough to encounter an extremely different and unique work.. A completely personal work.. The mind of a person who is not yours..

The fall and failure of an individual in life.. Sadness.. Doubt in oneself on the wrong path.. Staying in the cage of the past.. The hopeless rains that cover the sky every day of the future, the problems and memories that, like a nightmare that lives in your brain, slowly poison your existence with pain and an endless end.. Until you reach the point where you just want not to exist.. Not existing is the beginning of starting from yourself.. The answer to the question of whether we should commit suicide? Is exactly here.. The place where we pass from existence and choose non-existence..

Reading these memories was a different experience. In our culture, we are used to reading the memories of successful individuals, hardworking and goal-oriented people, those who every day have been getting closer to their goals from the memories they have written.. But the memories of Sylvia Plath are a different story.. A more human kind than all other written memories.. The memory of an ordinary person.. The human memory on the wrong path.

Reading this book was an opportunity.. The memories of Sylvia Plath were not written for "others".

Reading this book was like walking in the quagmire of Sylvia Plath's world.. A world of forever decaying or in eternal decline.. A world where, as time, this indeterminate parameter of human life, passed over it.. Regardless of the events, it again embarked on the path of self-destruction.. In the end, accompanying Sylvia Plath was a bitter experience but it encouraged me to write, to write what passes in my mind and over me..

P.S: The numerous deletions by the translator were annoying.

P.S: The act of hesitation in deleting the memories of the last two years that ended with Plath's suicide, although understandable, caused this effect to be incomplete.. And it led the reader of the book to an end with a sense of dissatisfaction.

This is more interesting than any of her publications - fiction or non-fiction.

Plath's works have always been a source of inspiration and fascination for readers. Her novels and non-fiction pieces offer unique insights into her mind and her experiences.

However, these journals take us even deeper into her world. They are a raw and unfiltered look at her thoughts, emotions, and dreams.

Those who want to know more about Plath must read these journals. They provide a more intimate and personal understanding of the woman behind the words.

By reading her journals, we can see the evolution of her ideas and the development of her writing style.

It is like having a front-row seat to her creative process.

These journals are a must-read for anyone who is interested in Plath's life and work. They offer a wealth of information and a unique perspective on one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

This book was published nine years ago.

And this year I read it.

The excellent translation of the book is very refreshing.

However, the excessive deletions bother the reader.

Of course, the sad plot also makes reading the book difficult, but the fact that it is written with all these years of memories and when you read its memories, you feel so close to it as if your own life is very beautiful.

Wow, I truly took my sweet time to complete this book. No, to be precise... I really, really took my time. Goodreads informs me that I initiated reading it in April 2018 and only managed to finish it in August 2020. And what a journey it has been!!

Honestly, I can't hide my disappointment upon realizing how much of her journals has been lost, perhaps forever. Ted Hughes claims to have destroyed the last volume, but Sylvia also had periods when she simply didn't keep a diary. Reading her journals has been, above all, exhausting. I could only pick it up when I was feeling particularly depressed, as her entries could get quite intense at times. However, most importantly, Sylvia kept a diary as a writing exercise. This is why you'll have to wade through hundreds of pages where seemingly nothing is happening, but in a somewhat pretentious yet beautifully written way.

All in all, I'd say it was worthwhile spending 2 years intermittently perusing her journals for the few insightful, emotional entries that describe her anxieties as an aspiring author, her relationship with Ted, her deepest insecurities, and her battle with depression (which she unfortunately lost). And yes, Sylvia definitely made me want to start keeping a diary. If only I weren't so afraid that I'd unconsciously adopt her voice, thus defeating the whole purpose.

Saturday: July 19, 1958. Paralysis still plagues me. It's as if my mind has ceased and allowed the phenomena of nature - shiny green rosebugs, orange toadstools, and screeching woodpeckers - to roll over me like a juggernaut. As if I must descend to the bottom of non-existence, of absolute fear, before I can rise again. My worst habit is my fear and my destructive rationalizing. Suddenly, my life, which always had clearly defined immediate and long-range objectives - a Smith scholarship, a Smith degree, a won poetry or story contest, a Fullbright, a Europe trip, a lover, a husband - has, or appears to have, none. Dimly, I would like to write (or is it to have written?) a novel, short stories, a book of poems. And fearfully, dimly, I would like to have a child: a bloodily breached twenty-year plan of purpose. Lines occur to me and then stop dead: "The tiger lily's spotted throat". And then it's an echo of Eliot's "The tiger in the tiger pit", to the syllable and the consonance. I observe: "The mullberry berries redden under leaves". And stop. I think the worst thing is to externalize these jitters, so I'll try to shut up and not blabber to Ted. His sympathy is a constant temptation. I am meant to be busy, gay, doing crazy jobs and writing this and that - stories and poems and nursing babies. How do I catapult myself into this? When I stop moving, other lives and single-track aims push me into the shadows. [...] Will this pass like a sickness? If I don't resolve my trouble from within, no outside shower of fortune will make the grass grow. I feel under the influence of opiates, hashish - heavy with paralysis - all objects slipping from my numb fingers, as in a bad dream.

It's truly beautiful.

After approximately two weeks, I finally finished reading the diary. I noticed that I only spent this amount of time after my friend Heba Nour's comment. I thank her because she reminded me to think about the diary and read what I had transcribed from it. Sometimes I spend this amount of time or more reading a book, and usually, I feel the length of the time and that I have spent a lot. But with this book, despite having some boring parts, I didn't feel the time pass.

I didn't know Sylvia Plath, but I accidentally came across this book of her diaries. So I searched for her out of curiosity and found out that she is an American poet and writer. But that wasn't the reason I read the book. The book is not small, but knowing that she suffered from depression for most of her life and that she committed suicide at a young age, dying of carbon monoxide poisoning after putting her head in the oven, intrigued me. She placed wet towels under the doors to act as a barrier between the kitchen and her children's rooms. She put her head in the oven that was turned on. She was thirty years old. This made me want to read the diaries to learn more about her life and her struggles with depression because I am personally drawn to reading anything related to depression.

There was a part that I missed in her diaries, which was the period after her divorce and before her suicide. The diaries were sometimes boring in some parts, especially when she talked about her meetings or conversations with people. And the last part, to be honest, I skipped because it was about describing her neighbors and their lives, and I didn't feel interested in that. There were parts of her diaries where I felt that if I were good at writing, her words would be an exact copy of what I would write. So I was very affected by it. There were parts of her talk about her feelings and experiences that were terrifyingly close to mine. And perhaps because of these parts, I finished reading the diaries.

Her life, her struggles, her relationships, her love, her sadness. Her intense desire to write was very important to her, but she suffered from a lot of rejections of her works, which was very hard for her. Her readings and her views. Her jobs and the impact of every job she had on her.

She refused to marry because she would lose herself. "If they asked me what role I would play, I would say, 'What does the word role mean?' I'm not determined to play a role if I get married, but I will continue to live as a normal, rational human being. I will continue to grow and learn as I have always done. I won't change my roots in my lifestyle."

"Does this accuse me of dominance? Of the struggle for dominance? Oh, the number is wrong, of course. I'm afraid of being dominated and of not being like that. Only that submissive, cowardly person is easy to submit. But this doesn't mean that by nature I want to dominate... It's the balance that I seek, not the continuous submissiveness to the desires and interests of one person."

She was always trying to encourage herself and write to herself what she should do and not complain to her husband so that he wouldn't be sad. I was impressed by her conversation with herself and her encouragement of herself. Her sadness and despair sometimes, and her encouragement and confidence in her writings at other times. Her talk about her hatred and anger towards her mother. Her talk about her husband and her relationship with him. And her intense desire to be a mother and her sadness at not being able to conceive and losing her pregnancy and her sadness before giving birth.

She talked in detail about her second child, "Nicholas," and I felt that I was with her in the room and waiting with her.

"Life is a unity despite all the intoxicating moods, despite the dazzling joy, the noisy parties, the fake smiling faces that we all wear. And when you finally find someone and feel with him that you can reveal your weaknesses, you stop in the state, dumbfounded by your words. They are so empty, so ugly, so stupid, and so boring because they have been imprisoned for a long time in the cold darkness inside you so that there can be ten minutes of joy and relaxation. But the unity of the soul in its terrible consciousness is terrifying and powerful."

"I have the choice to be either always active and happy or negative and sad, or I can sway between the two."

"I'm afraid. I'm not strong. I'm empty. Behind my eyes, I feel a deep, dark hole filled with the void of hell, not made. I never thought, I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility. To crawl back into the womb."

"Love is an illusion, but I'm living in it. For every love, if I could believe in it."

I have written a lot of what she said, and when I read it again now, I feel a desire to reread her diaries. But I'm looking forward to reading her novel, "The Bell Jar."

March 2, 2019

This is the book that introduced me to Sylvia Plath.

Her poetry and 'The Bell Jar' would follow. I gradually came to appreciate her profound love for just writing.

She had an extraordinary ability to make the most mundane things interesting.

To truly have a complete and accurate picture of Sylvia Plath, 'The Journals' are absolutely integral.

One of my greatest thrills was to visit Smith College. There, I met Karen Kukil and actually had the opportunity to pick up and read the actual journals.

In the Mortimer rare book room, I was also able to see the drafts of her poems written on the pink Smith College stationary.

To read the Journals for me was like getting closer to the real Sylvia Plath, and moving away from the sensationalized version that often circulates.

It is highly recommended for anyone who is interested in Sylvia Plath.

You will gain a deeper understanding and a more intimate connection with this remarkable writer through her own words in the Journals.

The Problem of Sylvia Plath, Her Poetry, and the Necessity of Her Journals

Sylvia Plath's untimely suicide at 30 has led to a complex and often controversial perception of her. Some critics label her as immature or hysterical, while others defend her integrity. Those who champion her work do so at a personal cost. Sadly, her personal life and the circumstances of her death have affected how her work is read.

When expressing a liking for her poetry, one instinctively knows the implications. Admiring Plath may lead to suspicion of morbidity, bad taste, or doctrinaire feminism. However, if one believes she is an important 20th-century poet with a lasting impact on lyric poetry, the importance of her work cannot be denied. But beware, her work is seen through many lenses, and even admiring ones can cloud judgment.

Many admirers make the mistake of imagining Plath as a one-dimensional figure, like Phaedra. But the speaker in her poetry is as multidimensional as she was. Despite writing from her emotional realities, it is crucial to separate the person from the creative result. This is where the Unabridged Journals are significant. They offer insights into her joyful, backbreaking work, the methodical revisions, and the thoughtful ways she crafted her poems. They reveal the seams and underpinnings of lasting poetry.

Plath's sensibility is dark, and she twists nature to her own effect. But there is something uncommon about her work, a forcefulness of the persona and a strong inclination toward wholeness and harmony, although many only see the jaded and sardonic undercurrents. One important aspect of her work, often neglected, is the idea of the spirit derailed from its source and always trying to find its way back. The speaker is constantly in flight, searching for a means of return.

This is the dilemma of the soul and the artist. It is because of this that I believe Plath was brilliant and created her final poems with genius. Her final book, Ariel, was a swift achievement, with many poems characterized by a propulsion or forward momentum. Like Shakespeare's Ariel, the spirit of her work is driven toward an understanding of enslavement and the necessity of freedom.

To know Plath more closely, one may read her journals. They give a glimpse into her working methods and the associative powers of her mind. They allow the reader to separate the person from the persona and humanize the writer. One sees her struggles as an imperfect person in pursuit of her art.

Unfortunately, some of her journals are missing or destroyed. But the remaining ones allow a close reader to see her ideas before they appeared in print and understand how she approached her work. There is no doubt that Plath's art was a labor of love. Her euphoria and intensity are tangible. It is important to read the journals and her poetry as it appears on the page and remember that all art is artifice.
Plath's mythology may be off-putting at times, but it is a distinct voice full of human emotion. The world she creates is recognizable, like a dream. Her final poetry is a brilliant invention, prepared by a writer in pursuit of her best. It is a visionary form, a reality that seems more real due to its extreme divergence. Great poets trick their readers by making the art form feel more real. Perhaps this was her "call," as she said herself. But the reader's call is to recognize the trick and commend the art for its brilliant illusions.

When you hear the name Sylvia Plath, two things immediately spring to mind.

The first is her tragic suicide, a fact that cannot be ignored despite the pain it may cause.

The second is her remarkable contributions to the world of writing.

I deliberated on how best to present the first aspect and ultimately chose to state it bluntly.

I am aware that this word carries a great deal of pain, and for some, it is a topic they prefer to avoid.

If you are one of those people, I suggest walking away from this review.

While I do not plan to delve deeply into the topic, it may be mentioned here and there as it weighed heavily on my mind while reading her journals.

This collection of journals is written by a young woman trying to navigate the crazy world.

I was surprised by how long it took me to read it.

Part of the reason can be attributed to the length, but most of it is due to the content.

The pages are filled with raw emotion, mixed with an eerie detachment and a business-like approach to compartmentalizing her life into goals.

I found it challenging to switch between the extremes.

One moment, I was salivating over a delicious meal she described, and the next, I was lost in a fog of anguish due to her unfulfilled desire for a relationship.

A few pages later, I would be reading her list of short-term goals and how she had to meet them to achieve her long-term goals.

Then, she would quickly descend into self-loathing for not meeting her goals and then just as swiftly return to describing a beautiful view or a detailed interaction with an interesting person she met.

I spent a lot of time reflecting on how these dips and dives came to be.

I firmly believe this is how Plath's mind worked, and I can relate to it on some level.

Some days, I wake up with a "get shit done" attitude, while other days, I am more focused on simply being, which means drifting from thought to thought and randomly focusing on the minute details of inconsequential things.

This is why I was so bothered by this book and had to read her journal entries slowly.

Tearing oneself down for not meeting goals is one thing, but seeing someone else do it is quite another.

The other reason for the sporadic mentions, I believe, has to do with the content provided to the reader.

I don't think the author of this book cherry-picked it, but I do suspect that Plath's husband did.

The author does mention that some journals were missing or destroyed, and if he had the power to do that, he could also have altered the content of others.

I think we will never truly understand the full picture of what she experienced and how she felt, and that's okay.

There are certain aspects of our lives that should remain private.

I will admit that while reading her journals, I felt the same guilt I felt when reading what Kurt Cobain left behind.

Not enough to stop, but enough to make me feel a little ashamed.

The fact that she is mostly known for her suicide is unfortunate because her talent was her true shining light.

I am in awe of her abilities and cannot express how much I admire her.

She could combine common and obscure words in unique and thought-provoking ways.

She could describe a room, an emotional response, or a love for picking her nose with equal amounts of respect and detail.

She was a powerful wordsmith, and the world has suffered a great loss with her departure.

I give this book four stars because it will forever live in my memory.

Autumn 1401
I have 24 hours with myself, and I'm thinking about how to write a review for a book that actually accompanied me through the most important and complex three months of my life. Sometimes I would forget that this diary of a girl who lived 60 years ago was not my own diary.

So many of my emotions and mental complexities were kneaded into the sentences that Sylvia wrote, and they were so similar and always followed the rhythm of these three months. The only reaction I could have was to close the book, kiss its cover, and put it on the list of the most important books of my life. I think this book has become much more personal to me than one that I can recommend or describe to someone else.

And if I could go back to that time and say something to Sylvia...
It's that don't be so hard on yourself. I know, girl, I'm also afraid of spending a day in vain, and I'm also afraid of not being able to reach all those distances and personalities that I want to have in my life. And I promise to come back from it. But where did all that complication of everything end? You took your own life.
If only you knew that fifty or sixty years later, thousands of other Sylvias would read your diary and cry like dogs. If only you knew that your memories would become a more valuable literary treasure than poems. I'm sure you would have preferred that. Because you loved being recognized.

I would tell you not to be so obsessed with your poems not being published and not to be jealous of your husband because you are now "Sylvia Plath". Although you deprived yourself of life too soon to see this name and image. But maybe that's what makes you special. Maybe you had to be a symbol of "the consequence of obsessing and being hard on oneself". Maybe your death finally gave meaning to your life, just as you always thought.

This whole diary is filled with so many lines and marginal notes that I can't choose which ones to put in a review.
I lost a part of myself in this book, I placed it, I took it away, I inhaled it, I understood it, I found it, it helped me to inhale with the feeling of similarity and enjoy the hardest moments of this autumn. The enjoyment of melancholy. The enjoyment of being a woman, the crazy and complex hormones of femininity, the enjoyment of having my dreams bigger than my abilities and my talent for writing being greater than my abilities.

Thank you, Sylvia.
For writing these, for living your life, although short, for being complex and yet understandable for most women of the past, present, and future.

Five windows within these 500 pages:
Being a woman
Being a writer
Being in between (outside + inside)
Being perfectionist and bigger than the world around
Loving life and thirsting to give meaning to life...

If you get too hard on any of these and can't swim, you'll drown (

It's truly astounding how deeply I can relate to Sylvia in these journals.

I firmly believe that all feminine beings should read this. Her entries are refreshingly honest and raw, laying bare her sensitivities, obsessions, daily routines, and insecurities.

More intimate than any of her poetry books, Plath's journals provide a greater and more profound insight into both her personal and literary struggles.

We can see the turmoil within her, the challenges she faced, and the creative process that led to her remarkable works.

This book holds immeasurable value for me, and I'm certain that I will continue to refer to it for many years to come.

It serves as a source of inspiration, a reminder of the power of honesty in writing, and a window into the complex and fascinating mind of Sylvia Plath.