I have spent the past couple of weeks trying and failing to write something coherent about Sylvia Plath as an influence on my writing. I am still failing.

When you’re a goth girl in high school with pretensions of poetry, liking Plath is a cliché when it’s not a rite of passage. People roll their eyes indulgently when you tell them this, as if she’s something you’ll grow out of some day. She is known enough that even people who don’t know her poetry have Thoughts and Opinions on her – you remember being told that she was selfish, a drama queen, a bad mother. Definitely not someone who should be a role model, not someone who should matter.