The Last Confession of Slyvia P. (2022) by Lee Kravertz

 1,001 Novels: A Library of America

The Last Confession of Sylvia P. (2022)

by Lee Kravertz

Belmont, Massachusetts

Massachusetts: 6/30

      I'm well into Massachusetts in the Audiobook portion of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project- the Audiobooks run ahead of the e-books and actual books because fewer than half of the titles are available as Audiobooks.  The Last Confession of Sylvia P. is an interesting novel by a debut author about- yes- you guessed it, poet-novelist-all-around-icon Sylvia Plath. Kravertz weaves historical fact and fiction together to tell the story of a hand written manuscript of The Bell Jar which is discovered during a house flip in the Boston area in 2019.  Kravertz travels backwards and forwards in time and invents several interesting characters- some real some fictional.  There's Robert Lowell, the real life poet, Boston Rhodes, a fictional antagonist who writes a similar style of poetry and Ruth Barnhouse, a pioneering psychiatrist (by pioneering I mean she is a woman psychiatrist in the 1950's, who treats Plath during her tempestuous teen years.

      And although The Last Confessions does of course go deeply into issues related to being a young woman and grappling with mental illness, it does so within the context of world-renowned poets, instead of being about another sad working class mom abandoned by the alcoholic father of her children- which is seriously the plot of about 20 percent of the books in the 1,001 Novels project up to this point.