I read the Instagram of Sylvia Plath and my dead friend

From the book “FIRST LOVE: Essays on Friendship” by Lilly Dancyger. Copyright © 2024 by Lilly Dancyger. Published by The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Heather had invited me to her apartment in Inwood several times over the last year or so, but for one reason or another the appointment never worked out. We kept promising each other “soon.” Now I was finally here for the first time to help her pack her things. She had been dead for a week.

I scanned the stacks of books teetering against a wall, not on shelves but stacked like bricks, and a narrow, cream-colored spine called out to me: “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath. It felt like a morbidly fitting souvenir of that day.

As a teenager, Heather was a real Plath girl. So was I – just two of countless teenage girls since the ’60s who shared our love for the stimulating and violent “Ariel” poems and “The Bell Jar,” Plath’s fictional account of her first mental breakdown, suicide attempt and hospitalization an institution proclaimed – a This is by no means a subtle way of making sure the world knows we are in pain. “I really identify with Esther Greenwood,” we adults would say: a threat. “Claiming Plath” was a way to elevate our youthful sadness from everyday and expected cliché to literary, tragic, and romantic. To connect our early childhood fears with a worthy and important story.

Of course, we weren’t the first or last teenage girls to romanticize sadness and tragedy. Before Plath, there were Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson and the Brontë sisters, each with their own grumpy followers.

More recently, there was the “sad girl aesthetic” era of Tumblr – young women posting photos of themselves with mascara tears running down their cheeks, or black-and-white selfies of themselves looking sadly into the distance stared, with quotes about depression and existential boredom for captions. The Sad Social Media Girl has a very specific tone – the inherent vulnerability of expressing sadness coated with a protective sheen of sardonic humor and irony. In addition to the dramatic crying selfies, sad girls’ Tumblr pages were full of simple, sullen statements like “I hate my life,” written in glittery pink cursive or pastels.

* * *

When I got home from cleaning up Heather’s apartment, I wrote “Heathers” in small, neat font on the front cover of her copy of Ariel, as if I could forget it. I started reading it, but it took me five poems to get to “Lady Lazarus”—to the line about the importance of “sticking it out and never coming back at all”—before the connection to Heather felt too painfully literal. I closed the worn paperback and placed it on a shelf, where it sat unopened for years.

The tragedy of her death, mixed with the brilliance of her poetry, made Plath an icon, but she also made her sadness and tragic end her defining characteristics. It was only decades later that a new generation of Plath scholars championed a nuanced reading of her works—urging fans to celebrate her birthday rather than her date of death, and publishing analyzes and extended readings of her poems about bees and not just bees those that cause death and violence. “The public perception of Plath as a witchy death goddess was born and would not die quickly,” writes Plath biographer Heather Clark.

I don’t want to bash Heather in this way – as sure as I am that she would absolutely relish the title of “witch goddess of death.” Because of her sad death, it is too easy to remember her as a sad girl. To rewrite her life, starting with the end. But she had so much more to offer.

She carried herself with the ease of a beautiful woman, swaying her hips and not blushing at rude jokes, while the rest of us were still awkward girls.

She was proud to be Jewish and proud to be Chinese, and she enjoyed exploring both sides of her heritage through study, food and fashion – she cooked noodle balls in a qipao and called herself a “Lower East Side.” Special”.

She had this booming laugh – not the cackle that crackled the air around her when someone else said something funny, but a single goofy, exhaled giggle, the laugh that she laughed afterwards she said something she found funny. It was so completely out of character for the hot girl it came from, and so unexpectedly and endearingly stupid that you couldn’t help but laugh at her when she laughed at her own joke.

These are the things I want to remember most about Heather.

But the sadness was such a big part of who she was, how she saw herself, and how she moved through the world, that glossing over it would do her no more good than it would take over my memory of her entirely.

* * *

When Heather first called me in the middle of the night and said she wanted to kill herself, I treated it like an emergency.

When I woke up, I was confused to hear my phone buzzing on the table next to my bed. It was after three in the morning. I blinked the sleep from my eyes and cleared my throat before replying urgently, “Hello?”

On the other side of the line, Heather was sobbing. When she finally spoke, it was more of a wail: “I want to die!”

I offered to come to her, asked if she wanted to come to me, asked if I should call an ambulance, but I quickly realized she didn’t want to be saved, she just wanted to be heard. She wanted someone to know how much it hurt her. So I listened. I went back to bed and lay down but didn’t close my eyes.

“I love you,” I said. “I’m so glad you’re alive. I am so sorry.”

Eventually her sobs turned into sniffles. I asked her if she thought she could sleep and she sighed, “Yes.” When I woke up a few hours later, there was a text from her: “Thank you. Feel better. Love you.