Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath

by Jillian Becker

Overview

Giving Up is Jillian Becker's intimate account of her brief but extraordinary time with Sylvia Plath during the winter of 1963, the last months of the poet's life. Abandoned by Ted Hughes, Sylvia found companionship and care in the home of Becker and her husband, who helped care for the estranged couple's two small children while Sylvia tried to rest. In clear-eyed recollections unclouded by the intervening decades, Becker describes the events of Sylvia's final days and suicide: her physical and emotional state, her grief over Hughes's infidelity, her mysterious meeting with an unknown companion the night before her suicide, and the harsh aftermath of her funeral. Alongside this tragic conclusion is a beautifully rendered portrait of a friendship between two very different women.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466839779
Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Publication date:	05/12/2003
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	130 KB

About the Author

Jillian Becker is the author of several novels and works of nonfiction, including The PLO and Hitler's Children. She lives in England.

Jillian Becker is the author of several novels and works of nonfiction, including The PLO and Hitler’s Children. She lives in England.

Editorial Reviews

In this slim memoir, Becker (The PLO; Hitler's Children) recounts her final memories of the extraordinarily talented yet notoriously depressed poet Sylvia Plath. The book is split into six sections, each given titles reminiscent of Plath's own titles (and with the same typeface as well). The beginning chapter highlights Plath's last days, spent at Becker's home, where she moved with her children after the abrupt departure of her husband, Ted Hughes. With so much already written on the subject of Sylvia and Ted, it is not surprising that Becker doesn't provide any significantly new information, yet her intimate glimpse into what has become a mythic literary figure is both engaging and comforting. What she does manage to do is to give voice to Plath's ghost, recounting the last days, hours, and perhaps even moments of her life, so that, in her death, Plath might be better understood. Ultimately, Becker pulls back the shade on Plath's life, exposing a darker, more pathological Hughes and bringing Plath's own plight out of the black. A good addition to any literature collection.-Rachel Collins, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A British writer with whom the poet spent her last weekend perceptively details her final days while offering her own insights into Plath’s death, marriage, and ambitions. Plath has become an icon, polarizing friends and family as well as admirers, and Becker tries to set the record straight, as she sees it. She believes feminists have falsely hijacked Plath for their cause, failing to recognize that the intensely ambitious poet never "scorned the traditional woman’s role of wife and mother, homemaker and housekeeper." Becker begins with the bitterly cold Thursday afternoon in February 1963 when Plath phoned and asked if she and her children could visit. Once there, she asked if they could stay overnight. As the two women’s children played, Plath talked bitterly of Assa Wevill, the woman her estranged husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes, was living with. Later, she asked Becker to sit by her bed until she fell asleep, showing her the two bottles of pills and their instructions: two from one bottle at bedtime, two from the other on waking. Saturday night, Plath dressed up and went out to meet someone; Becker speculates it might have been Hughes, seeking a reconciliation. The author details in measured prose the family’s Sunday lunch and Plath’s request that Becker’s husband Gerry take her and the children home afterwards. Her host wasn’t overly concerned: Plath seemed cheerful at lunch, and Becker agreed with the poet’s doctor that the need to take care of her children would keep her alive. She also admits to being tired of coping with Plath, whose need for her attention was relentless and exhausting. In the remaining chapters, Becker ponders the poet’s reasons for taking her life, speculatingthat a sense of losing her gift might have been as much a factor as her failed marriage. Addressing the myths that have grown up around her friend, Becker wants to reclaim the part not consumed by Plath’s ambition. Thoughtful and intelligent: a welcome corrective to the legend.

Kirkus Reviews

"I met her after she and her husband Ted Hughes had parted. We quickly became friends but only for the last few months of her life. She was lonely, almost friendless as well as husbandless. The flattering courtiers had departed with the king." —from Giving Up

“Jillian Becker fits in more good sense and compassion on the subject of Sylvia Plath than books ten times as long.”—The Independent (London)

From the Publisher