In Katie Roiphe’s new book, In Praise of Messy Lives, she writes of a romantic misadventure in which she ends up sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend, wondering, “Was at least part of the whole miserable escapade the fault of the Milan Kundera book everyone was reading, The Unbearable Lightness of Being?” Sometimes, reading a certain book at a certain time in your life can have deleterious effects. Especially if you’re not the only one reading it. Even if only one or two other people you know are reading the book, it can be enough to create a tiny zeitgeist, so that all of you are framing your actions or your worldviews in reference to that passage in the middle where the protagonist smears the blood of her home-aborted fetus on the page of the letter she’s writing to her ex-lover and writes “HERE’S WHAT’S LEFT OF THE BABY!”
When I was 23, I was travelling through Eastern Europe with two friends and a copy of Anne Stevenson’s 1989 biography, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Julia had bought it in a secondhand shop in England. First she read it, then I read it, then Matthew read it; then we read sections of it out loud; then we copied out part of it onto notebook paper and blue-tacked it to the wall of the Prague garret we were living in. I still have the passage, in Julia’s neat handwriting. It’s an excerpt from one of Plath’s letters to her mother from Spain, dated July 25, 1956, and we copied it out because at the time, Matthew and I wanted to be writers and it described a hopelessly ideal writing day:
We wake about 7 in the morning, with a cool breeze blowing in the grape leaves outside our window. I get up, take the two litres of milk left daily on our doorstep in a can and heat it for my cafe-con-leche and Ted’s brandy-milk...Then we go early to market, first for fish...There are mussels, crabs, shrimp, little baby octopuses and sometimes a huge fish which they sell in steaks...Then we price vegetables, buying our staples of eggs, potatoes, tomatoes and onions...If only you could see how fantastically we economize.
For the rest of the morning Ted and I write, he at the big oak table, I at the typewriter table by the window in the dining room. Then I make lunch and we go to the beach for 2 hours for a siesta and a swim when the crowds are all gone home and we have it completely to ourselves. Then two more hours of writing from 4 to 6, when I make supper. From 8 to 10 we study languages, me translating Le Rouge et Le Noire and planning to do all the French for my exams this summer; Ted working on Spanish.
Of course, we knew, from Ted Hughes’ poem “You Hated Spain,” that the picture Plath presented to her mother was, if not a full pack of lies, at least half a deck. Which was fine; for some reason it didn’t bother us to have a testament to how deceptively unhappy a person can be stuck up on our kitchen wall, and not even its proximity to the gas oven felt morbid or wrong. Somehow the brandy-milk, the mussels, the baby octopi, and Le Rouge et Le Noire outweighed all of Plath’s misery.
Then we took a trip to Värska in Estonia. Värska is a tiny town known for its healing mineral water, and we had read about a spa with rejuvenating mud baths—therapeutic mud hand-culled from the pristine waters of Lake Lämmijärv. I had never been to a spa, and it seemed like a glamorously Eastern European thing to do. We rented a car in Tartu and drove south, toward the Latvian border.
When we arrived, it was to a long, low building with a view of the lake, and at the reception desk we gave our names and paid in Estonian kroon. I’m still not sure whether what happened next was my fault, or whether it would have happened anyway; as the person least embarrassed by sounding stupid speaking a foreign language, I was deputized on most occasions with my Latvian-English, Lithuanian-English, or Estonian-English dictionary to try to explain what we wanted. The Estonian word for “mud” is muda, or pori, and “bath” is vann or kümblus, and using some combination of these words, I got us sent down a long hallway, following a nurse tick-tocking ahead in high heels (even EMTs wear high heels in the Baltics—in Lithuania we watched two women jump out of an ambulance and haul a dying man onto a stretcher, clattering over the cobblestones in stilettos as they boosted him into the back of the van).
We started to wonder if we were in the right place when the woman led us into a hallway where a man on a gurney lay staring at the ceiling, his skin grey. We sat down to wait, and another old man shuffled through on the arm of a nurse. We were in an older wing of the building, with cement floors and flaking yellow paint on the walls. “I think it’s a sanatorium,” Matthew said. We had been picturing the kind of place where well people go to get weller, pink and pampered with scrubbed-out pores. Instead, we were somewhere sick people go for treatment they actually need, and when the nurse came to take us into the room where the treatments would take place, we didn’t know how to explain that there was nothing, to our knowledge, actually wrong with us.
It was at this point that I started thinking about Sylvia Plath. Stevenson goes into some detail about the electroshock therapy Plath was subjected to, and Matthew, Julia, and I had all talked about what it might feel like, to be strapped down and have your brain blasted with lightning. What had stuck with me was Plath’s loss of agency; once someone decides that you are mentally ill and need treatment, there’s a sort of inevitability to whatever happens next—you’ve been put into a new category, and you no longer decide what happens to you.
In a foreign country, you already look a bit insane. Whenever you try to communicate what you want, and by extension who you are, you fail to a greater or lesser degree. We had landed ourselves in a treatment facility, and when a woman arrived to guide us through a door and into a room where we would take our clothes off, I tried to explain—”I’m so sorry, I think we’ve made a mistake,”I said, leafing helplessly through my dictionary—but she opened the door and gestured for us to go through, and we obeyed.
It was a long room with steam clinging tubercularly to the walls, and the tubs were in a row down one side. We took our clothes off behind a curtain in a corner, and walked naked down the row until the nurse showed each of us to a tub, then we climbed in and lay down. My tub was like a scuffed yellow sarcophagus, deep grooves steadying my hips while a sloping back kept my head raised. The cleansing mud of Lake Lämmijärv pulsed in through a black hose. A whiteout of steam rose, and I could hear water dripping, and Julia in the next tub over splashing slightly in the soupy dirt. I felt dizzy and tried to get up, and when the nurse came over to see why I was struggling, I said, “I’m not sick, I’m sorry, I just want to get out.” She smiled at me, put a hand on my shoulder, and gently pushed me back down. I closed my eyes, ready for the hot lightning helmet, the blue metal crackle, for the fate of the person I was now.
