Before Lee Kravetz published his first two acclaimed nonfiction books, “Supersurvivors” (2014) and “Strange Contagion” (2017), the San Mateo psychotherapist turned writer came up with the seed of the idea for his debut work of fiction,“The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.,”while visiting an in-patient psychiatric ward.

Back in 2013, Kravetz noticed an old paperback copy of Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” among the books available to patients at the Menlo Park Veterans Affairs hospital where he was doing postgraduate work in psychology. The iconic autobiographical novel, first published in January 1963, tracks Plath’s descent into depression, her early suicide attempts and her hospitalization while still an adolescent.

Finding this well-worn copy on a ward for those currently suffering from mental anguish prompted Kravetz to dive deeper into Plath’s life and the cultural milieu she inhabited in the late 1950s and early ’60s when her writing career took off.

The resulting novel, out Tuesday, March 8, is a riveting and humane literary mystery, in which a fictional handwritten draft of “The Bell Jar” is discovered, with no known provenance, in a Boston attic, leading a contemporary curator, Estee, to probe its authenticity. As readers, we’re swept up in the puzzle of how a mixture of creative inspiration, pathology and rivalry fueled the creation of Plath’s enduring account of a young woman’s suffering.

Kravetz also tells the story from the perspectives of Plath’s pioneering psychiatrist, Ruth Barnhouse, who treated her at McLean Hospital, and the fictional poet Boston Rhodes (loosely based on Anne Sexton), a fierce rival of Plath’s who also attended Robert Lowell’s famous poetry seminar at Boston University.

Lowell, who was also hospitalized at McLean, looms large in the book as the paternal force spurring the poets in his workshop to create work that exposed their raw internal life to readers, to create confessional poetry that was anything but “safe.”

Kravetz spoke with The Chronicle recently about why Plath’s body of work endures and how confessional poetry’s influence can still be felt in potent first-person art forms being created today.

问:Can you tell me about your initial idea for the novel? I understand you worked at the same hospital in Menlo Park that inspired Ken Kesey to write “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

A:Yeah, it’s true. I had always wanted to be a writer, but around the age of 30, I decided, well, this isn’t really happening for me, so maybe I should do something different. So I went to graduate school (at Santa Clara University) to become a psychologist, and was doing postgraduate work at the same VA where Kesey had worked.

There was a kiosk of old paperbacks for patients to read, and “The Bell Jar” was there. I had read it many years earlier, but when I reread it I realized the novel is actually a very thinly veiled truth about Plath’s experience at McLean Hospital. And within Sylvia Plath’s story is a parallel story of the birth of confessional poetry.

问:So the link between madness, or mental illness, and art was key for you?

A:Yeah, when you look into this period (the late 1950s and early ’60s), you realize that confessional poetry didn’t start in some university town, or in the European countryside. This remarkable, revolutionary poetry movement started in the walls of a mental hospital. People like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell were all hospitalized around the same time, for basically the same thing. They called it manic depression, but now we call it bipolar disorder. I thought, that’s a story.

问:The novel conveys how passionate these poets who all studied with Lowell were about poetry and wrote as if their life depended on it.

A:在某些方面,他们的生命取决于它。我tried to show that Sylvia’s psychiatrist, someone who became a mentor and friend, showed Sylvia how to channel writing and creating to actually treat her condition. She really set Sylvia off on this journey to become the person that we all know and love today.

问:In the contemporary section of the novel, the auction house preparing to sell the “Bell Jar” draft has to consider whether Sylvia Plath is still relevant today. Why do you think her writing has such enduring appeal?

A:我thought about this a lot. Part of the answer is that her contribution to confessional poetry, which is so raw and brutally honest, is still felt today. If you look at poetry today, or you look at singer-songwriter rock music, or even show-don’t-tell memoirs, Sylvia was the one who broke the mold.

I’ve read “The Bell Jar” so many times now, and what’s brilliant is that you’re so embedded in Sylvia’s head that most people reading it don’t realize that even though she’s hospitalized in the middle of the novel, she’s having a manic breakdown from page one. Every single internal thought is of somebody who’s bipolar, and it’s a beautiful, slow build.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that Sylvia died at such a young age. She was only 30 and left this big hole that we filled with mythology of who she could have become.

问:How did you wrestle with the question of whether artifacts like a “Bell Jar” draft, if it existed, should be sold to private buyers?

A:There’s no easy answer to the question of who should own art. There’s an argument to be made that it’s awful when artifacts like Plath’s go on sale and disappear into private hands. But, to be fair, a lot of collectors loan them out to museums or libraries.

As I was finishing up the draft, I heard that Sylvia and Ted (Hughes’) daughter, Frieda, was putting all of these items she discovered in their house up for auction. You could buy Sylvia’s journals. You could buy their wedding rings! There was a part of me that was like, I get it. I’d want to own that. On the other hand, I thought, this is awful. These are human beings and artifacts from very personal, private moments.

I really grappled with the question: Who owns Sylvia Plath? She struggled with that herself, asking, am I to be owned by Ted Hughes, my very famous and successful husband? Am I to be owned by my mother, who has certain plans for me? Am I to be owned by (her psychiatrist), who is always encouraging me to be myself? She was torn in so many directions.

“The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.”
由李Kravetz表示
(HarperCollins; 272 pages; $25.99)

Kepler’s Books presents Lee Kravetz in conversation with Meg Waite Clayton:Virtual event. 6 p.m. Tuesday, March 8. Free, with a $15 suggested donation; $32-$43 with book. RSVP atwww.keplers.org.

Book signing:In person. 7 p.m. March 16. Free. Bookshop West Portal, 80 West Portal Ave., S.F. 415-564-8080.www.bookshopwestportal.com

Lee Kravetz in conversation with Janis Cooke Newman:In person. 1 p.m. March 26. Free. Book Passage Corte Madera, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. 415-927-0960.www.bookpassage.com