New novel explores the continuing influence of poet Sylvia Plath: 'She is all of us'

The new novel “The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.” uses real and fictional people and events to explore the continuing influence of poet Sylvia Plath.

At the center of the book is a mystery involving another novel: Plath’s semi-autobiographical work “The Bell Jar.” The novel tells the story of a bright young college student who struggles with mental illness and ends up in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt. “The Bell Jar” was published in January 1963 only a month before Plath took her own life. Eventually, it became a best seller and is still widely read today.

Journalist and psychotherapist Lee Kravetz is the author of “The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.” Plath’s “present and incurrent” voice in “The Bell Jar” is part of what makes this journey through a manic episode relevant 60 years later, he says.

“In the middle of the novel, [Plath’s] main character winds up hospitalized for trying to kill herself,” Kravetz says. “But if you really read it from the very beginning, you realize that she’s actually manic from page one. And the way that she sort of allows us to get into her character’s mind and behind her eyes, it was almost journalistic.”

Kravetz first picked up the novel while working in a mental hospital in Northern California — the same one where Ken Kesey worked that inspired “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” — after getting his master’s in psychology. One day, Kravetz saw “The Bell Jar” in the waiting room and found it remarkable how the book could have been written today.

One character in Kravetz’s book is Dr. Ruth Barnhouse, who