Like many young, aspiring writers, Rebecca Brill was obsessed with Sylvia Plath’s diaries. Their luminous, sensual, and often dramatic prose charts the ups and downs of Plath’s internal state with a serious attention that young women’s feelings rarely receive. So when the pandemic lockdown began in 2020, Brill, in the grip of a depression brought on by quarantine isolation, turned back to the diaries. “I needed company,” she says. At the time, Brill was a soon-to-be MFA graduate at the University of Minnesota, and interested in the intimate lives of…
