The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Facebooker

Jess, I was struck by the story of Demi Moore and the allegedly suicidal tweeter, too. As you so rightly point out, tweeting to a near stranger about your plans to kill yourself shows signs of disconnect, rather than connection. In this sense, I think Peggy Orenstein was onto something—even if she didn't spell it out—when she talked about a "growth through loneliness" she got to enjoy as a teenager in a pre-connected era who could discard old selves (and friends) with each new step. The irony she starts to unpack is that—according to psychologists in her piece, at least—many kids seem to find connectivity more lonely than being alone. All those "friends" reporting on their activity can make you feel even more like an isolated weirdo when you're down. 

I'm sure tons of psychologists are studying Facebook as social phenomenon. One question I have is about how Facebook plays with your sense of time. I suspect it messes with eveyone's sense of time, but perhaps it has been especially odd for those of us in our 30s and 40s who had already gone through the process of letting go of old friends when ... voilà! There they were, friending us again, flooding our news feed with their status updates about kids, husbands, wives, work, American Idol. Sometimes I find it reassuring; at other times, extremely destabilizing, a vortex forcing me to contemplate years gone by, loves lost, friends I let go of without fully intending to. I may have had a higher-than-usual dose of this of late because my mother died at Christmas, and she was the head of my middle school. So I was flooded with messages from old friends (now new "friends") about her. It was extremely reassuring at the time, I have to say: It made me feel that life has some continuity and, well, enduring connection, especially since many of these notes were about my mother's influence on their lives. But at less stressful moments, I'm sometimes shaken to glimpse a photo of an old lost kindred spirit on my feed. ... What would Anne of Green Gables have thought? The other day at brunch, a slightly older friend talked about being pulled into this same vortex, becoming almost depressed by this reminder of times past, selves left behind, there on his screen, updating away, hour after hour. It's a strange kind of connection, that's so far. Sometimes I have an almost physical need to touch the screen and get past the pixels.

Dark Ceiling Without a Star

Meghan, thank you for writing something about the death of Nicholas Hughes, the son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes who killed himself earlier this week at the age of 47. I've been unsettled by this news all week but unable to think of anything to say besides: how horribly and irredeemably sad. To readers who grew up on the myth of Sylvia and Ted (and if readers have a tendency to mythologize Sylvia Plath, it's also because she mythologized herself, with maddening narcissism and consummate literary skill, in her poems and journals), Nicholas will always be the baby of Plath's brilliant final poems, the one whose "clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing."  "I want to fill it with color and ducks/ The zoo of the new," she wrote in the poem "Child." Instead, her legacy to him was a lifelong struggle with depression, what the last lines of that poem call "this dark/ Ceiling without a star." "The pain you wake to is not your own," she assured her then-9-month-old in "Nick and the Candlestick." But, of course, it was: Our mother's pain is always our own. While there's no way of knowing whether Nicholas' depression was the result of nature, nurture, or both, it's difficult to imagine a more painful early childhood: Assia Wevill, the woman Ted Hughes left Plath for and who would raise Nicholas and his sister for six years after their mother died, killed herself and her 4-year-old daughter in a grotesque copycat suicide/murder six years after Plath's death.

Like you, I found the New York Times' roundup of tributes to Plath surprisingly anodyne and platitudinous (including, for me, Elaine Showalter's, which argues for Plath's inclusion in the "they-died-too-young" literary pantheon alongside Keats without giving a sense of what her contribution to 20th-century poetry actually was). I've always thought that, had Plath lived, she might have become one of the great poets of motherhood. Her poems about pregnancy are delightful (and unexpectedly playful for a poet we associate with suicide and despair), and her description of the experience of childbirth in her journals, which you mentioned in a post some time back, is the least sentimentalized and most gripping I've ever read. The awful news of her son's death seals the deal: The poet who could have been the bard of maternity (among the most under-represented of all human experiences in literature) will now be remembered as a cautionary tale about the dangers of maternal depression.

Sylvia Plath's Legacy

I imagine a lot of you saw that a few days ago, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, committed suicide. Today, the New York Times has devoted a short commentary section to answering the question "Why the Plath Legacy Lives." To answer that question, they've wrangled short pieces from smart commentators like Joyce Carol Oates and Peter Kramer (author of Listening to Prozac). Of them all, only Elaine Showalter begins to answer the question by really addressing Plath's work.

Certainly Plath's honesty about suicide helps create a mythology about her, but it's hardly the whole reason readers are drawn in. Plath made being a woman an equal subject for the imagination as being a man, and she did it (mostly) without being didactic or ideological, unlike many of her peers. Plath's poetry is astonishing for its musical insistence; she was inspired by nursery rhymes (which she was reading to her children) to explore hard, repetitive rhymes as a way of creating meaning. Her poems about motherhood, particularly "Morning Song," capture the ambivalence of the mind that has been tangled up in the bodily reality of  motherhood. In that poem, she speaks of standing "cow-heavy" in her floral nightgown looking down at her child, whose "moth-breath" has tickled "the flat pink roses" of the wallpaper. And she records an impermissible thought:

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

I have written about Plath for Slate here and here, and for Poetry magazine here, and I continue to think that Ariel, her posthumous book of poems, is one of the most important books of English-language poetry of the 20th century.