The Research Phase in Writing Feels Like Falling in Love

Join my on my honeymoon with Sylvia P.

I am buzzy as I write this. Giddy. I used to say that my very favorite feeling in the world was inspiration. In recent years, I’ve realized that cozy is my true favorite but there’s really nothing quite like the buzz of inspiration. It’s that feeling of first falling in love with someone, when I suddenly have so much energy and my insomnia isn’t filled with fatigue but instead with excitement, that amazing period when music is more ear-catching and jokes are funnier and everything glitters a little bit brighter. Falling in love is such an amazing feeling and every once in a while inspiration feels a lot like falling in love. I am falling in love right now … with Sylvia Plath.

Bear with me …

I just re-read The Bell Jar, having not read it since I was in my late teens. At the time it was just one of a series of books that reflected a certain emotional truth back to me … I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Prozac Nation, Girl, Interrupted … I cut my teeth on those tales when I went through my own first wilting experience of depression. I wouldn’t admit for another ten years that it was depression and then only because I had nothing left in me to deny it.

I have read many, many memoirs and novels since then that are in the same vein. Memoirs by women about their internal and external truths are my favorite genre. The Glass Castle, Educated, Untamed … my list is long. But I’ve never gone back and re-read those original books. Until now. And it’s opened up this gaping cave that I’m strangely eager to go spelunking in. Perhaps because the cave of my own mind isn’t as dark as it once was and I feel like I have the headlight to see more this time around.

In any case, my resumed relationship with Sylvia Plath may have remained just a one night stand, a nostalgic chat with an ex who holds up a mirror to where I was when we were once entwined, except that then I read The Last Confessions of Sylvia P … and now I am smitten. I am falling head over heels. At the very least, I’m ready for an intense summer fling. I returned to the library, grabbed every book by and about and inspired by Plath and am committed.

It’s funny the way that falling in love happens - with a person, with a project.

I have pretty much always met people online, so when I’m ready for a relationship, I get on the apps (or before that the websites, Craigslist even, it’s true.) And I am excited and nervous and bored and confused and unsure … but I swipe and I go on the dates and most are fine. Just fine. I meet someone, we like each other okay but not well enough or there’s not a spark or it’s clear we want different things or whatever. Sometimes it takes a few dates to figure that out. And it continues to be exciting to get that dopamine hit of “maybe this is a match” but also disappointing and annoying when it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere and I’m wondering if I’ll ever find my person, if I am being too picky, if … And then suddenly the right one is there and it’s totally different. Somehow, in the big world of all the options, the person who is exactly right at that time arrives … and we fall in love, and the whole world glitters for a little while.

I’ve fallen in love like that a few times. I think now I might be with the person I’m going to spend a really long time making a life with. We’ve been together about three and a half years and we are in a comfortable, happy place. But I still vividly remember the first weeks and months of falling head over heels in love. Being in love is amazing. I don’t want to trade it. But oh falling in love is the greatest thing. Everything else ceases to matter because all I can think about is falling in love but also everything else matters so much more because I’m grateful and happy … 

Falling in love is about the other person but I confess that one of my favorite parts of falling in love is getting to articulate myself to someone new again. This sometimes happens in great new friendships as well. As I put words together to explain who I have been and who I am now, I get this new picture of myself, I integrate new understandings I didn’t realize I had. In falling in love with someone, I fall a little more in love with myself. Does this happen to you?

They say love finds you and you can’t get it if you’re trying too hard … and yet … You kind of just have to put yourself out there, though, and look for it, and keep looking even when the dates are mediocre and you’re not sure and then one day suddenly the person across the table from you sparks that thing that turns you head over heels. And that’s how writing is. You have to show up to the page, again and again, even when it feels like it’s really boring and you wish you were drinking wine instead of coffee or you wish you were back in your jammies snuggled up with your dogs watching crime dramas instead of dragging on this conversation with someone who is perfectly fine but you just don’t have the energy for them … you have to show up to the page and keep trying to find the right one. And then one day, suddenly, you do, and you’re in love, and you can’t wait to get to the page, and everything glitters and your words come flowing and you fall a little bit more in love with yourself because you are inspired.

I never know when it’s going to happen. I will go for months on end writing routinely and following various interests down rabbit holes that go nowhere. That’s okay. Those dates are fine. But then somehow something will grab me and shake me and I’ll suddenly be so excited to research and write. Last summer it was Yoko Ono … and then I thought I knew who it would be next but that fizzled out. And I just kept following ideas until finally, finally, I fell in love again.

And that’s where I am with Sylvia Plath. I didn’t expect anything more than a date. But then I found that novel, and I started falling in love. And now all I want to do is read Plath’s work, read books written about her, watch movies and talk about her. I didn’t expect this. But I’m here … The thing about here, though, is that here is the research phase, and it feels so hard to articulate any of what I’m thinking about what I’m reading because everything is so new. Have you ever wanted to protect a relationship for a while before bringing it into the world? (My partner and I met a few months before the pandemic. We had met each other’s families and a few friends then March 2020 happened and honestly it was this perfect timing where we were falling in love and could just incubate together with no shame for a bit.) 

Which is why it’s been a couple weeks since I read The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. and I find that it’s really hard to write my thoughts down still. It’s so new. But this newsletter is all about sharing what I’m researching while it’s in progress, so I wanted to bring it to the table in all its messy falling in loveness.

So, let me tell you a little bit about this Fictionalreality book by Lee Kravetz. It’s a novel that is based on The Bell Jar, on the life and relationships of Sylvia Plath, and also with a core fictional storyline that brings together different points in time. It’s told through three lenses (I love a book with multiple alternating narrators!) In present day, there is Estee, an art curator who finds a never-before-known-about handwritten copy of the early draft of The Bell Jar. Throughout the novel, she’s in the process of figuring out if it’s real, where it came from, and how it was never known about. This takes us back in time to the 1950s, which has two narrators - Boston Rhodes (a poet based on Anne Sexton) and Ruth Barnhouse (a psychiatrist at McLean who is working with Sylvia Plath.)

The melding of truth and fiction is so seamless in this novel. The woman being treated at the hospital is Sylvia Plath … but this part of the story is clearly informed by The Bell Jar … so she’s really that book’s protagonist Esther Greenwood, but of course Esther was based on Sylvia so … who is this woman being treated in this novel’s psych ward? It was this, really, that made me start falling in love. I got curious - what’s truth and what’s fiction and what does it matter anyway except that it’s incredibly interesting and I want to keep learning about it? I had this urge to go line by line through this novel and figure out what’s from The Bell Jar and what’s from other true parts of Plath’s life. I don’t honestly know much about Plath’s relationship with Anne Sexton and now I want to know all about it. How much of what’s shared in this novel relates to that true story? And of course there is a Ted Hughes in the book, a Robert Lowell, and although they are tangential to the female story for me, their impact on Sylvia was undeniable and therefore I want to know them, too. I want to know them like I wanted to know my partner’s friends and family. I want to gather together more pieces of Sylvia’s story like I want to have night-long conversations with a person I’m falling in love with. Lust is great but oh I want the pillow talk.

One of the things I love most about The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. is that it builds out The Bell Jar to a more elaborate story that is what the original had left me wanting. I decided to re-read The Bell Jar on a kind of whim. I am always writing and researching about art and mental health and where the two meet. And I got this impulse to read it. I found it intriguing that the quotes I had written out as a teen and put in journals or on my bathroom mirror were still so poignant to me that I remembered them as I re-read them. Of course, some were too famous to forget, the fig tree of options after all (which also, I just saw again today, introduces us to Sylvia at the beginning of the biopic about her.) I was also surprised to realize that there weren’t nearly as many mentions of the protagonist’s writing as I remembered. 

I had remembered the basic story - a writer goes mad - but didn’t realize how little it really talks about her writing. The scenes where it does are very poignant. But I was surprised, realizing that I must have mixed up the true stories I read about Plath with the writing in the novel itself. The book is “semi-autobiographical” … Fictionalreality I like to call it … and memory is always a weird thing, so it’s not all that strange that I didn’t quite remember what was novel and what biography. In any case, The Bell Jar on its own left me wanting more information about the relationship between art and mental health in the protagonist’s life.

The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. gave me that. It takes what was hinted at and adds shape and character and nuance and information … If I were able to sit down at the end of The Bell Jar and ask questions, this novel would answer some of them in an intriguing Fictionalreality way. Oh you wanted to know a little bit more about me? I’ll tell you more … I’m hooked on hearing more. Let’s go on another date. Let’s talk all night long.

I have a huge stack of books to spend time with now. I haven’t decided if I want to start Wintering, which is another novel based on The Bell Jar, or if I want to move into biography or if I want to read another short story by Plath. Do I want to go to dinner or the theater or to walk in the park? It’s all good. There’s no wrong choice. If the relationship keeps developing like I feel like it will, there will be plenty of time for all of it. But also this falling in love brightness only lasts for a little while. It’s a heady, amazing, wonderful, energizing feeling. But it’s brief. 

After the honeymoon phase comes a different kind of nice period where you’ve realized this could last a while and you start to return to the rest of your life and the relationship goes through some bumps in the road … You only get this short honeymoon and that’s the time when I have to dive deep into the research and jot down all of my initial messy thoughts and reactions and keep reading and reading and talking and writing. Because after that, my relationship with Plath becomes something different. Either it fizzles out or I commit to a long-term project (a series of articles, a book …) and at that point there are some beautiful things but there’s also a lot of hard work to keep the relationship going. So right now I’m just going to embrace that I get this brief moment in time where I’m just absolutely infatuated with the person I’m “writing” (reading) about. 

Art for Thought:

• Are you in love with your work? How do you keep the flame going when the initial fire begins to fade?

• What neural pathways light up when inspired by creativity that are similar to those inspired by falling in love with another person?

• Is it possible to experience toxic relationships with your creative work?

• How do you know when it’s time to end a relationship (move on from a project) or when it’s better to push through together?

Feel free to just journal/muse on these things … but also feel free to share your thoughts! One of the things I love about this format of sharing my writing is that it reminds me of the early days of blogging or even before that when I had pen pals so what you have to say in response truly does interest me!