A Review of Pain, Parties, Work by Elizabeth Winder: Sylvia Plath in New York

While her two young children slept in an adjacent room, the brilliant poet and writer sealed off any openings or cracks in the doorway that separated them from where she was in the kitchen, with wet towels. She then turned on the gas oven and stuck her head in. Sylvia Plath was dead by her own hand at the age of 30. This is the scene that would come to mind whenever I used to think of her. I was familiar with her mostly bleak history that includes a suicide attempt, self-injury and a grievous marriage. In Pain, Parties, Work, Elizabeth Winder shares a different Sylvia Plath-one that is far from being ponderous and melancholy, adjectives her iconic name too often invoke. In the summer of 1953, twenty-year-old Sylvia, along with 19 other college girls, spent a month in New York as a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine and Pain, Parties, Work is a remembrance of that time.

Mademoiselle's target audience was sophisticated young women and so featured literature and fashion; Sylvia's invitation to be a guest editor was due to her winning their fiction writing contest and being on the magazine’s College Board in her junior year at Smith College. Winder's book is alive with the vibrant imagery of the fashion industry, though given my limited knowledge of fashion nomenclature, I found the constant references to haute couture to be a bit distracting. Culled from interviews with other guest editors of that summer and Mlle staff, PPW gives us a refreshing new view of Plath. In the Barbizon Hotel's dorm-like atmosphere, Sylvia is known by her fellow guest editors to be vibrant and outgoing, and as much an admirer of Bolero jackets as of Byron. While Sylvia's predilection for adventure and risk-taking might have been an indication of a manic nature, friends and acquaintances of that brief time saw little sign of a depressive one.

Elizabeth Winder came to believe that the Mlle experience was responsible for Sylvia's developing lifetime issues with anxiety. That well may be, I just don't know and am not sure that Winder proved this thesis. I do know that I thoroughly enjoyed being witness to a happier time in a life that saw more than its fair share of sadness. Now when I think of Sylvia, it is not only of pain and sorrow, but also of champagne and glamour.