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Here’s the thing. So the thing is. What I’m trying to say is�� Damnit I spent 40 hours of my life reading about Sylvia Plath and I have no comment.

This book gets a five star rating for achieving what it sought out to do. The energy of this was: “Let’s tell a comprehensive and nuanced definitive biography of Sylvia Plath.�� And like, mission accomplished.

This book gets a three star rating from me, a reader.

The best I can say is that Sylvia Plath was a very complicated person, full of contradictions. I am not a person of the “she was of her time and that’s okay�� ideology, so I should say: She held every woman in her orbit to a standard so strict, I have no hesitation in referring to her as an anti-feminist. (To be clear, she held herself to a similarly strict standard.) She also wrote a lot of racist things, thought an abortion was a character fault of the woman who had it, and she was incredibly vain. In short? I think if we ever met I would hate her with a fiery passion.

Mentally I’m struggling to reconcile these facts with the portrait in this book, a portrait of a struggling mother who dealt with near constant depression and suicidal ideation throughout her life. I don’t know. She’s complicated, and that’s okay.

I have never read a single piece of her work (shocking, I know), and this biography did not make me more inclined to. Make of that what you will.

Mostly, if you’re thinking of reading this, know that full sections of this follow the most banal and unimportant things going on in her life. Sylvia kept detailed calendars and schedules and I have now heard every single thing she ever wrote in them. I don’t know that I can recommend this book to anyone who isn’t a die hard Sylvia Plath fan.

This book also begs the question, if a biography is going to be so long and detailed that hardly anyone finishes it, did it make a sound?