Nothing To Do With Addiction, Everything To Do With ME

I finally got the shipment of books I'd ordered from Amazon yesterday, and one of the books is Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love.
I LOVE the whole Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes drama, so this book is a super fun amazing book for me.

I must admit, however, that I feel a little guilty for being interested in Assia Wevill. It isn't quite fair to dear Sylvia that I'm reading this book about her rival. However, she's an interesting woman in herself, and I kind of think I look a little like her. I'm really more on team Sexton than team Plath, anyway.

It's also kind of a strange book to read because Wevill really wasn't anyone except Plath's rival--at least not anyone that I would normally read about. She isn't a writer, isn't an artist--I mean, in the book there are pictures of some little paintings she did, so I guess she dabbled in the arts, and her letters to Ted seem rather literate for a woman who was just some ho...but her suicide is interesting, and I guess it fits into the tragic poetess milieu, which is obviously the bestest thing to read about ever.


I'm only into the first few chapters, so I haven't really gotten to the juicy bits yet. It's giving a full biography of Wevill, from her childhood moves all over Europe (her father was a non-religious Jew, so they had to leave Germany, and moved from Italy to Israel, where Assia spent much of her childhood).

The authors are a little critical of her at times, saying that she fantasized/imagined her childhood in exile from Germany as being much more dramatic and tragic than it actually was, but mostly they seem fascinated by her...kind of turning her life every which way and poking her with sticks.

The best parts of the book, which I've been scanning through in the pages ahead, I think are going to be the pictures, which are always fun, especially when you are fantasizing that the subject looks a bit like you, and the passionate letters to Ted.

I should read more about Ted Hughes. He seems like such a Panzer Man! (Hey wait, I guess he was THE Panzer Man, wasn't he?)

I want somebody else to read it and talk about it with me.