Sylvia Plath, get out of my head.

When I was thirteen I was, like so many other angsty teen girls, a wannabe poet and a wannabe suicide risk. I also had a borderline unnatural obsession with being published in Seventeen magazine. Everybody knows that no self-respecting seventeen year old actually reads Seventeen--this periodical (if you can use such an esteemed word to describe it) is meant for the twelve to fifteen year old set. Before you learn to drive, before you start sneaking out to go to peach schnapps-fueled house parties, you read Seventeen and dream of one day having a boyfriend and maybe buying a Hypercolor t-shirt.

Anyway, the sad-sack teenagae wastelander that was me at thirteen could not have been more delighted to discover that Sylvia Plath had actually once won the Seventeen short story contest. (Incidentally, she's not the only respectable author who has--Curtis Sittenfeld, Meg Wolitzer, and a handful of other seriously great woman novelists have also graced its pages.) Wow, I thought to myself, this Sylvia Plath character really has it all--publication in an established magazine, a suicide legacy, great bangs. I need to learn more! This was truly the level of my analysis when I checked out a bunch of her books from the library before a family trip to the cottage. I spent the better part of a week in the loft, devouring The Bell Jar (that was the same summer I read the Catcher in the Rye, I think--ah, to be a completely unwitting cliche again) and working out a timeline for literary fame and fortune. First, I'd win the Seventeen contest. Then, I'd intern at a better magazine. Then, I'd stick my head in the oven (or maybe OD on pills? I couldn't quite decide). My life's work was figured out.

Luckily, years of therapy and a serious attitude adjustment set me on a different path, and I didn't give Sylvia a whole lot of thought after that, excluding a brief period after her biopic came out, when I became obsessed with her wardrobe and the way she layered cardigans over one another. Until this weekend I don't think I'd read any Plath since I was a teenager. Then on Sunday night, I was skulking around a friend's place, looking for something to read. "Here," he said, from behind a Patrick O'Brien paperback, "you'd probably like this," and threw a battered copy of Plath's collected works at me. Bear in mind that this person has also urged me to read The Dark Tower series and had two James Patterson books on his bedside table. It was probably the weirdest recommendation he'd ever passed along. It turns out that he had to read it for an English class in another life, and he'd never thrown it out after he gave up on academia. I'm glad he didn't. There's something really vulnerable and strange about reading someone else's copy of a book, especially one that's been underlined and marked up and dog-eared within an inch of its life, one that you'd never in a million years think you'd find in their possession. It kind of makes you think about the writer and the person in a totally different way.

So I guess this isn't really about Sylvia Plath. It's about writers coming back into your life for random reasons at random times. And it's about finding something good to read under a trash heap, and finding some part of yourself long forgotten too. Has this ever happened to you? If not, I hope it will soon.