All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers(11)

But where even prolific authors sometimes have a dozen or so web pages filled with quotes, Sylvia had over thirty. This would be unremarkable but for the fact that she wrote only one novel and a handful of poetry collections. This is a function of the site’s more democratic tools: Users can submit quotes and vote on them so that they are arranged in order of their popularity. Just as her Etsy story confirmed, for a sad woman dead quite young, she had certainly made an impression. With more than ten thousand votes, the quote at the very top had nearly double the votes of those of the two runners-up that dwindled in the range of five thousand or so. It read:


I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.



I found myself unmoved by the sentiment and reluctantly disappointed in the readers who had flocked to the site to vote it into the top spot. I had such high hopes for these devoted girls. Sure, I, too, have been frustrated by my own finitude at times. I have mourned the doctor and the movie star and the teenage witch I never became. I can’t speak any foreign languages as well as I’d like to, nor can I juggle or play the piano. But when it comes to living and feeling all the shades of life, I have had quite enough of the ups and downs of mood and tone and would be perfectly content for dull tranquility to replace the sound and speed of chaos. Sylvia and I were off on the wrong foot.

Holding the honor of second place was the quote “If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.” This had always been something of a personal motto, and so I felt back on track to liking this woman the girls couldn’t stop talking about. In third was “Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.” This was the kind of thing I wished I had said to a man when I was much younger, had I been in possession of some shred of that conversational boldness. I developed a literary tongue only after such darling proclamations would have long been inappropriate. I immediately bought a necklace bearing the quote from a store on Etsy. I have never worn it, but I have photographed it lying in my palm on more than one occasion.

I finally found the retort I was looking for on the fifth page of quotes. It read “No day is safe from news of you,” and it comes from Plath’s poem “The Rival.” I planned to use it in the event of receiving a text message from a man I’d been dating for five months who had disappeared unceremoniously on Christmas Eve, despite prior plans and his knowing that I would spend my favorite holiday alone were he to cancel. The line was meant to be a clever way of saying that I had been following his social media accounts, knowing full well that despite the existence of the term “ghosting” that we now have for abandoning romantic interests without a word, he was, quite unfortunately, not at all dead. I didn’t use it on him when he reemerged, but I was grateful for having made the excursion to the pages and pages of Sylvia quotes. Further excavation brought me a wealth of gems about love and loss and death. They have all the wit of Dorothy Parker and the devastating brutality of Virginia Woolf. Yet somewhere along the line, the literary establishment lost sight of the genius because they saw it as too wrapped up in girlishness, a niche interest that half the world endures.

I fell in love with Sylvia in that scroll of disjointed quotes and fell with an enthusiasm I had not felt since college when I discovered the especially unforgiving love songs of the Magnetic Fields and the renewed rage of a mid-career Fiona Apple. Sylvia’s words were reflections on love and doubt and suffering and the brutal nexus where they all come together in a tender corner of the human heart (“You are a dream; I hope I never meet you”). But they were also nonsense and melodrama without their contexts (“I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets”). I went through page after page until the quotes came to an end, and throughout my read, I tried to put together The Bell Jar in something like order only to realize it is a chronicle of disorder. When their origins weren’t labeled, I wondered which quotes came from her poetry and which from her diaries, trying to detect either her bright-eyed teen years or the shadow-stricken days that drew her toward the light at the back of the oven. I wondered if ovens had lights in the back in 1963.

Her words made me want to see her face, but there was only one image that dominated the Google image search: Plath in a half-grinning portrait in which she seems confidently unimpressed. Her hair hangs just below her shoulders and is pinned on the left side of her head. She’s wearing a cardigan of some sort. She looks like she’s in possession of either a brand-new secret or a very old one, and it’s how I’ve seen many women writers look at readings when they’ve been asked asinine questions by men. But knowing this image well, I searched for more images. I turned to Tumblr, where enterprising young people have reliably excavated archives of lesser-known pictures to bring texture and time to the lives of those who are long dead. These young curators did not disappoint.

I found her unflattering school portrait, better left to the dustbin for such a beauty. I found her wearing a white pillbox hat as she gazes at her interview subject, Elizabeth Bowen, during an assignment for Mademoiselle. There was an image of her lying on the beach with her eyes closed, bronzed and grinning in a strapless white swimsuit. It seemed Plath was always wearing swimsuits, even in the absence of any evidence of nearby water. In another photo, she wears a modest two-piece swimsuit and holds a dandelion as if it were a pet, the note reading that this was taken in 1954, during her “platinum summer.” In another, she wears a black halter top and takes a drink, of what I can only assume is an adult beverage. She appears as mostly an outline blur on the cover of The Colossus and Other Poems, bedecked in a scarf or cape of some kind, and she is a smile incarnate on the cover of her unabridged journals. For all the unruliness of her heart, she was certainly a compliant subject for photographers.