Writing by Alice Robinson // photo by Gang of Babes photography
In the opening pages of my third novel, If You Go, Esther wakes in an underground facility. She spends the novel trying to find out where she is while grappling with the events of her life: her childhood; her relationships with friends and family; and her experiences of motherhood. In the writing, I was trying to figure out why Esther’s life had unfolded as it had. Why had living and loving posed such challenges for Esther? Some essential but unknowable mystery seemed to sit at the heart of the book that even I – its writer – didn’t really understand.
Underneath my misgivings about Esther’s motives lay some questions for me about the craft of fiction writing. Would readers follow me into Esther’s story? Could they suspend disbelief to become immersed in the far-out events I was describing: those close to our own known lives, and those a little more speculative? My writing process comes from a place of intuition rather than intellect, which is to say that I don’t always know what I’m making until the book is finished. As I was writing If You Go, I couldn’t be sure whether the scenes I was lining up in the manuscript like pieces of evidence could ever amount to a conviction.
About four years into the writing process, something came along to help me unlock the text I was making: Red Comet by Heather Clark (2022), the new biography of Sylvia Plath. At over one thousand pages long, Clark’s biography is a comprehensive book, incorporating previously embargoed archival materials. I’m not a big Plath fan per se, though I had read her poetry during my formal education as many of us are encouraged to. Really, I just love books about writers’ lives. Punchline: Red Comet is so good I wanted to start it again as soon as I finished. But the reading experience also gave me something beyond mere pleasure. It provided key insight into my main character’s life.
I was immediately struck by the correlations between Plath’s life – which was real – and Esther’s, which I had invented. Remember that I had already been working on the book for four years when I picked Red Comet up – many, many drafts completed – so any similarities between the women’s biographies must be…flukes? I can’t easily explain the correlations.
Both women harbour ambitions to be poets. Both marry clever, interesting men. Both move to country houses in search of rural, domestic bliss – perhaps misguidedly, given their artistic ambitions. Both give birth to two children in quick succession, girls and then boys. Both marriages end, and the women separate from their husbands. Both move to apartments in the city to start the next chapters of their lives. And both, it must be said – without spoiling the plot of If You Go – struggle to move forward. We all know what happened to Sylvia at the end of her story.
Having a real-world template for an event described in fiction allows the events of a novel to feel plausible – this is important for writers as much as for readers. Maragaret Atwood has famously said that there is nothing in her novels that hasn’t happened somewhere at some time. Red Comet allowed me to feel that this was the case for Esther’s story, too.
It’s also true that the common threads in Plath’s life – and Esther’s – recur in the lives of many women. They happened to me, too. I know about the pressures that parenthood puts on a marriage; a certain greediness for adult life that heralds too many changes too quickly; the longing for an idyllic life in the country which conflicts with the desire to make artwork and be in the thick of things in the city; the tensions that can arise in partnerships between ambitious people. Some readers attribute Plath’s marriage breakdown to Ted Hughes’ infidelities. But I recognised something different in Plath’s narrative, which to me explains the specific unfolding of her life: a frenetic leaping into adulthood, parenthood, love, land and work at a velocity that could never be sustained without something breaking. That is also the story I’ve tried to tell.
