Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today my guest is Kate Moses.

She is the author of Wintering, a novel of Sylvia Plath from St. Martin's Press.

It's a novel about the last months in the life of Sylvia Plath when she was working on,

rewriting, writing, and arranging her manuscript for Ariel.

This seems to me to be one of the most difficult assumptions that an author could take on to write the life of a woman at that degree of desperation in that level of what she herself considered to be creative mania.

What were the difficulties that you were aware of in starting this?

Well, the most immediate is the very passionate proprietariness that people feel about Sylvia Plath and their own version of who she was and what her work meant.

And I knew that I would be stepping into the fray with just an amazing amount of passionate doesn't even really respond to it adequately, that the level of

response to Sylvia Plath is still 40 years after her death, something that really amazes me.

And it excites me, too, because I think it's a testament to the authenticity of what she accomplished artistically.

But when I set out to write this book, I was indeed intimidated by the idea that I would be putting myself right

into the middle of it, especially because what I wanted, the story that I wanted to tell

through wintering was very much a story that I felt had not been not not not been adequately

understood and that's for many reasons one of them being that Plath's journals from that time

are either destroyed or disappeared as as Ted Hughes told us.

And also because our understanding of Ariel is very much predicated on how it was published,

...