Oh, Sylvia.

Last night I finally started reading The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. What a hoot that gal is. Was. Y’know. Till the suicide thing.

Like you, I used to think the most depressing thing about Sylvia Plath was the fact of her life and talent cut short long before it could all be fully realized. But here’s what’s more depressing: As an eighteen year old college freshman, she was tossing off journal entries more prescient and insightful than I have ever mustered, even in the full bloom of grown-up-hood. I think back to the journal I kept in my freshman year of college, and I must recognize that Sylvia and I may not even be the same species.

(I should note here that while at least two generations of readers now primarily associate Sylvia Plath with a weird sense of domesticity in suicidality and with poetry that betrayed her vulnerability to depression, Plath was above all else a starkly fine writer whose eye was as often turned to observe the world without as the world within. Her intuitive braiding of reason and emotion is unmatched among modern poets. And you should read her unabridged journals because the book is rich with great language and good thinking.)

Now here’s how eighteen year old Sylvia described getting a dose of nitrous oxide at the dentist: “I didn’t have to try hard to breathe now; something was pumping at my lungs, giving forth an odd breathy wheeze as I exhaled. I felt my mouth cracking into a smile.”

Here’s how eighteen year old me wrote about the same thing: “I like my new dentist. She said all you have to do is get this little thing on your nose and breathe through your nose. I seem to breathe very well through my nose. And it smells so fresh and clean. It’s just swishing past with no effort. I guess I must be about the best nose breather around.”

In her freshman year of college, Sylvia was coughing up cinematic descriptions and subtle, pithy metaphors for her journal. I, by contrast, am light years past college and still, when I journal, I tend to go on an on about how I don’t feel like writing and how I have a headache and how maybe I should just go back to bed. She processed, unflinching, the power of her own impulses and desires to shape her perceptions and assumptions. I whine about work and muse endlessly about whether I should buy a steam mop and which one to get. (They all work so well on the infomercials!)

When they come to posthumously publish my unabridged journals, they’ll find the whole mess of it shaping up to be a big swirly black hole of tedium, generating a vacuum powerful enough to suck the slightest speck of interest from the reader and spew it out into a vast empty space of indifference. Can’t do that with a steam mop.

That’s why I now realize I need to abandon those volumes of private journals I’ve been keeping since high school and become the easiest kind of fiction writer—a fake non-fiction fiction writer—a memoirist! (That’s still popular, right?) It’s never too late to start faking a life. Lacking substance, I now have the urge to fabricate a persistent drug problem and a much more colorful childhood. Soon enough, I can start checking the mail for an advance from a publisher who has nothing to do but trawl the internet for random memoirist types and send them money. Advance in hand, I promise I would promptly spend it on drugs and maybe a stylist to help me figure out what to wear on Oprah. It’ll be grand.

But at what cost? Could I sleep at night knowing that while my people continue to faithfully contribute to the world by going in early to the aerosol cheese factory and producing something that matters, I have chosen instead to betray the art of aerosol cheese-making and live, instead, on my own blather? Could I handle Liesl Schillinger’s inevitable paragraphs-long observation in the New York Times Book Review that while my grammar is mostly okay, the content of my thoughts is somehow both disturbing and uninteresting? Do I have the courage to face what might happen if Spazzita, my boss down at the aerosol cheese factory, were to discover my secret uncertainty about the benefits of aerosol cheese and summarily dismiss me for violating the fairly rigid ethical standards that dictate the production and distribution of cheese foods? Can I recover from the almost certain dressing down I might get from Oprah for failing to disclose that I actually don’t know what I’m talking about and have violated the high-minded integrity that surely suffuses the ethics of other people who contribute to the world by essentially writing down their emotional grocery lists?

Well, no. I can, in fact, handle precious little. And as the years recede behind me, I’m actually finding that that I can handle less and less. That, I suspect, might make me a better memoirist than, say, a real writer. Sylvia Plath, bless her heart, had some courage. True, it flagged under enough brutal treatment, but she held on as long as she could. I vaguely recall that I used to have courage. But my courage stole my wallet and left in the middle of the night years ago. Courage and I always had, at best, a cagey relationship. Bravado, I got; I traffic in stupidity, after all. But courage, not so much. That’s what makes Sylvia’s journals such interesting, if painful—in an affluence of ways—reading for me. She had so much of what I don’t got. And it’s almost heartbreaking to notice the small thing I seem to have, that she didn’t. She had courage and discipline and tornadic intelligence. I have misplaced confidence in winning lotteries I don't actually play. But there's something else. Apparently years ago when we were teenagers at the dentist, I learned to trust that I can breathe.