4
" and maybe it was the spirit of her dead mother sickening her, or maybe it was her inability to grieve a person she should, by biological rights, have grieved, but as with so many diagnoses it is, in the end, the symptoms that matter, not the cause, because this is what being alive means, this is what being a person means, to be sickened by an illness known as you. "
― Heidi Julavits , The Vanishers
11
" Of the many mysteries attending Plath (for example, whether or not she’d meant to kill herself—she’d stuck her head in the oven, true, but had left a note for her neighbor instructing him to “call Dr. Horder,” a note she possibly expected him to find in time to save her), this was the one that most fascinated me—no matter how many photographs I’d seen of her, I had no idea what she looked like. Each new photograph undermined the believability of the others, as though she’d been, even while alive, unwilling to commit to her own face. "
― Heidi Julavits , The Vanishers