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67 Dinner with the Hugheses I must be hell to live with. —from Sylvia Plath’s journal What meals these journals make! Each dinnertime, I dip into the portions of her life— her words a bilious side-dish to my pasta. Born the year she died, now I’m the woman who feels the smother of a dark scrim hiding her brilliant, too-infrequent states of grace. I wonder if you’d find me “hell to live with,” or if you’d want to live with me at all. Reading her talk of love—“I want a god”— I see my search for you. The edges blur. We star as them: you play the bearish Brit, I the shrill and shining suicide. Somehow, I force myself to shut the book, let her disease, her god Ted’s waning valor retreat from three dimensions back to two. The plot’s just plain old us. You’ll never be my own, entire. A name burns to a crystal— the heroine you’ve lost but just can’t quit. ...

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