Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath

Rating:
Summary: too much the writer and too little the friend
Review: Becker does not seem an empathic, loyal friend of the late poet.
She uses gimcrackery effects to sell better her story:
"The exaggeration taken with her suicide makes it too probable that her final act was(...) dedicated to Posterity. Too much the writer and too little the mother, did she gas herself because the story she invented for her life demanded that ending?"
What about a deeply suffering woman, likely with post partum depression in the last months of her life, who was desperate?

Rating:
Summary: too much the writer and too little the friend
Review: Becker does not seem an empathic, loyal friend of the late poet.
She uses gimcrackery effects to sell better her story:
"The exaggeration taken with her suicide makes it too probable that her final act was(...) dedicated to Posterity. Too much the writer and too little the mother, did she gas herself because the story she invented for her life demanded that ending?"
What about a deeply suffering woman, likely with post partum depression in the last months of her life, who was desperate?

Rating:
Summary: Jillian, my dear -- No More!
Review: I just finished this book and was suprised at the brevity. I expected more from a "memoir," and was disappointed that it lacked depth. I have read a great deal on Sylvia Plath and this book did not tell me much that I did not already know. I did, however, like the personal spin Becker put on her encounters with Plath and Ted Hughes. The writing is very accessible and personable without excess sentimentality, which I do appreciate. However, I found the narrative overall to be lacking in punch and wonder why it took Becker so long to come out with her version of the last days. Could she be riding the coat tails of the renewed Plath interest surrounding the upcoming release of Sylvia & Ted (the film)?

Rating:
Summary: How wrong most you people are.
Review: I'm afraid a lot of the reviewers, save one, have got completely the wrong end of the stick about this book. Mrs. Becker wrote this 40 years later because Ted Hughes had just died and that made it a lot easier to share her feelings. Secondly, Mrs. Becker was a great friend of Sylvia's but thie book is not a poignant, maudlin story but an account true to what is to happen. If you are the kind of person that is looking for a soppy, emotional story then a short account of Sylvia Plath's final days is not the right book for you. Finally, the film did not cause Mrs. Becker to write this book, but the film, other books and the revived interest occurred because of Mrs. Becker's book: Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath

Rating:
Summary: A worthwhile addition to an unfinished life's memoirs
Review: If you're interested enough in the life of Sylvia Plath-the life she mined so deeply and painfully in her unforgettable poems-to read more than one of the many biographies in print about her, I think this book, though obviously very slim-is a worthy addition to the reams of prose and supplementary material about Plath. And it is a *supplement*, not exactly a complete book in its own right. Not that there's anything wrong with that: Ms. Becker is a very different, very individual voice among the others who knew Sylvia, very much her own person-another writer, another mother, not a genius, but definitely a friend-and frankly, the sort of friend Plath desperately needed, and one we'd all be well-off to be able to turn to in despair, as Sylvia famously(well, it's famous *now*)did in the last days of her life. Some of the observations here, never repeated anywhere else, are indeed "haunting": the wearying task of sitting up all night with an emotionally disturbed girlfriend, at wit's end about exactly what to do; the unsettling visit of Becker to Plath's apartment to fetch neccessary items, finding the place eerily clean and apparently empty of children's clothes(Plath had two toddlers); the abrupt changes in Plath's moods, the memory of Sylvia, dressed to the nines, about to go out on the next-to-last evening of her life for a mysterious "date"(with her husband? with another suitor? We'll never know)stopping at the door to smile down at her baby son and tell him warmly, "I love you"-these are the sorts of observations that could come firsthand from only an intimate, if not a longterm friend. The memories regarding Ted Hughes' behaviour after Plath's suicide are something else again-quite a shock, and also quite believeable. You won't find much of that elswhere, either.

The thing about Plath memoirs and writings is that all of them seem to offer little pieces of the massive puzzle that was the poet and the woman. This is one more small piece that I'm very grateful was published.

Rating:
Summary: Jillian, my dear -- No More!
Review: In which a recent acquaintance of Sylvia Plath's attempts to comfort and protect the poet from herself during her last horrible days on this earth.

There is much that is scalding and unnecessary in this thin little book. It repeats so much of what we already know -- perhaps from Becker herself -- and is flawed by the author's insistent need to defend herself against (whose?) assumption that she should or could have "done something" to protect Plath from her compulsive need to kill herself. Well, maybe she could have or should have, but she didn't, as didn't many who knew her far better than Becker did, so there's really no need for all the justifications.

The lack of insight displayed here suggests that while Becker might have been stung by real or imagined criticism, she has done little in the last 40 years to understand the hopeless circumstances in which she found herself.

The fact that she barely knew Planth, but found it necessary to blather about it 40 years later, makes me wonder if there isn't a wee bit of the "cashing in" afoot on the part of the author.

Read the day after finishing Middlebrook's marvelous book on this subject, "Her Husband," I found it a total waste of paper.

Rating:
Summary: Too little, too late
Review: What happened with this book? As other reviewers have noted, it is very slight -- less than 100 pages, almost pocket-book size.
The author never tells us exactly how she first became acquainted with Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes, and it would have been interesting to know how this striking and charismatic literary couple impressed her.
There's no context for her own part in the story -- what was Becker doing at that time? Had she begun to write professionally? She mentions giving up the notion of writing poetry when humbled by her reading of the work Plath showed her, but doesn't tell us much about her own ambitions, milieu or activities. Becker's husband Gerry plays an important role in the narrative, helping to take care of Plath, even driving her home on the night of her suicide, but we aren't told whether he too was a writer, artist or other brand of intellectual, nor whether the Beckers stayed married nor if he is even still living.
There is some unforgettable new material in Becker's account of the gathering in a pub after Plath's burial, which puts Ted Hughes in a bad light -- interesting, considering the recent rehabilitation of his reputation vis-a-vis Plath in Diane Middlebrook's "Her Husband" and Elaine Feinstein's biography of Hughes.
Unfortunately, Becker probably waited too long to tell her own version of the last events of Plath's life. Too often, she'll say that she doesn't remember what they talked about on some occasion -- honest, but frustrating.
When I finished the book, I started paging through it again, as if I thought I would find the rest of the story this time. Becker could have given us an authoritative glimpse of the young creative people she and Plath lived among in the London of that time -- "a string of luminaries about to be switched on" is her nice phrase for them -- but she seems to have been in a hurry to get the bare facts down and to move on.
She writes that she was moved to write the memoir because some of Plath's biographers had interviewed her, then used little or nothing of what she had to tell them. Where is all that misundertood or unused material? I felt that Giving Up had the potential to be a better, fuller book, but something -- time, guilt or disinclination to the memoir genre -- got in the author's way.