Page 126 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

In the early 1960s, when Plath committed suicide, the suicide rate for women of her age in England
reached a staggering 10 per 100,000—driven by a tragically high number of deaths by gas
poisoning. That is as high as the suicide rate for women in England has ever been. By 1977, when
the natural-gas changeover was complete, the suicide rate for women of that age was roughly half
that. Plath was really unlucky. Had she come along ten years later, there would have been no clouds
like “carbon monoxide” for her to “sweetly, sweetly…breathe in.”

7.

In the fall of 1958, two years after their wedding, Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, moved
to Boston. The poetry that would make her famous was still several years away. Plath worked as a
receptionist at the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts General Hospital. In the evenings, she took a
writing seminar at Boston University. There she met another young poet by the name of Anne
Sexton. Sexton was four years older than Plath—glamorous, charismatic, and strikingly beautiful.
She would later win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Live or Die, establishing her
reputation as one of the most formidable contemporary American poets. Plath and Sexton became
friends. They would linger after class, then go out for drinks with another young poet, George
Starbuck.
“We would pile into the front seat of my old Ford, and I would drive quickly through the traffic
to, or near, the Ritz,” Sexton recalled, in an essay written after Plath’s death:

I would park illegally in a LOADING ONLY ZONE telling them gaily, “It’s okay, because we
are only going to get loaded!” Off we’d go, each on George’s arm, into the Ritz and drink three
or four or two martinis.

Sexton and Plath were both young, preternaturally gifted, and obsessed with death:
Often, very often, Sylvia and I would talk at length about our first suicides; at length, in detail,
and in depth between the free potato chips. Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia
and I often talked opposites. We talked death with a burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it
like moths to an electric light bulb.
Sexton came from a family with a history of mental illness. She suffered from wild mood swings,
anorexia, depression, and alcoholism. She attempted suicide at least five times. She stole a bottle of
the barbiturate Nembutal—deadly in large enough doses—from her parents’ medicine cabinet and
carried it around in her purse. As her biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook explains, Sexton wanted
“to be prepared to kill herself anytime she was in the mood.”

In her early forties, she went into decline. Her drinking got worse. Her marriage failed. Her
writing deteriorated. On the morning of October 4, 1974, Sexton had breakfast with an old friend,
then lunch with another friend, as if saying goodbye.