My mom told me that when she was a girl, she and her sisters dried their hair in the oven.

The subject came up when I told her I was reading The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. She didn’t know or remember the poet, so I was reminding her that Plath had committed suicide by putting her head in the oven.

Mom didn’t remember that I had been reading about Plath since I was a teenager, studying The Bell Jar, but also several biographies and her poetry.

When she told me about her childhood memory, I wondered if the idea of killing yourself by turning the gas on and shoving your head in the oven would have ever been considered, if people decades earlier hadn’t had the custom.

Plath started keeping journals when she was 11 and she never stopped. These newer released journals are those of her adulthood, 1950-1962. Plath killed herself in February of 1963. I know when I come to the end of these journals, it will be sad, but right now, I found something new and joyful.

The 18-year-old was already an award-winning poet, but her private writings are so lyrical – her simple thoughts to herself, pure prose. She would have definitely been a top blogger if she lived today, and you could be sure that the words you read were felt fiercely and relentlessly by their writer. Her entries are about her days at Smith College, the frenzy of dating in order to find a true love, and how both of those topics were so superficial - in light of the war the country was living through at the time. Fear was the underlying theme of her work, but she wove that fear right into the beauty of the fireflies or crickets she watched under the stars at night.

And even humor:

“Today is the first of August. It is hot, steamy and wet. It is raining. I am tempted to right a poem. But I remember what it said on one rejection slip: ‘After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation’.”

Her passion for writing was apparent:

“I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have. And you cannot regard you own life with objective curiosity all the time.”

And her trepidation:

“Nothing is real except the present, and already I feel the weight of centuries smothering me. Some girl a hundred years ago once lived as I do. And she is dead. I am the present, but I know, I, too will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.”

I am not a poet. I can’t wrap my head around how one’s thoughts can be so easily transcribed onto paper so beautifully. But I am grateful that she figured it out.