Stop 2: Book Acquired!
Road Trip Press has acquired a book! Let the editing begin!
Road Trip Press has officially acquired a book! After reviewing all the proposals we received, we found one we connected with, and we met with author Jessica Doe to discuss moving forward with the project. We are thrilled that she has decided to work with us on this journey to document the publishing process and are excited for you all to follow along with us. The book is a searing exploration of the relationship with food and mental health. Author Jessica Doe brings poetic insight and articulation to name a teetering preoccupation between gluttony and starvation that readers are sure to find illuminating. Doe describes her own long connection to Sylvia Plath’s work—and poetry at large—particularly through the lens of Plath’s obsession with food and Doe’s own eating disorders. Doe’s voice throughout is attentive, honest, and luminescent, and her work is vital for working out the messiness of food and being human.
Personally, I’m excited to work on this manuscript because of my own experiences with Plath’s work. I first encountered Plath in the digital teenage wasteland of Tumblr in the early 2010s. Her work was frequently reblogged alongside images of fictional young women I had seen myself in, lyrics of songs I loved, and carefully curated pictures pulled from the Pinterest accounts of girls I wanted to be. The insular, aesthetic-based Tumblr communities in which I stumbled across Plath’s words for the first time didn’t really have a name, but you knew them when you saw them: colored with cigarette smoke and ruby red ribbon, humming to the tune of Lana Del Rey, compiled almost entirely of images of thin young women. And when you dug a little deeper, you’d find the eating disorder content running beneath it all.
I was introduced to Plath’s work via a microculture obsessed with aesthetic and populated by young women openly struggling with, and sometimes glamorizing, their eating disorders and other mental health struggles. It’s an association I’ve never been able to shake, and one that I think persists today. You’ll find The Bell Jar on nearly every “sad girl book recommendations” TikTok, often with a Lana song playing over it. In some ways, Plath’s work has become an online signal for a user struggling with disordered eating. In Rayne Fisher-Quann’s article standing on the shoulders of complex female characters, she posits that “because young women are conditioned to believe that their identities are defined almost entirely by their neuroses, these roundups of cultural trends and authors du jour often implicitly serve to chicly signal one’s mental illnesses to the public”. Fisher-Quann uses several hypothetical roundups signaling various neuroses as examples of this phenomenon, saying that a girl who calls herself a “babydoll dress/sylvia plath/red scare/miu miu/lana del rey girl” is an online signal for an eating disorder.
My experience with Plath’s work is less with the work itself and more the cultural touchstone it has become. I’ve discussed her work briefly in some of my classes, but never truly studied her in full despite how much her position in culture fascinates me. Jessica Doe has devoted a great deal of her academic career to studying Plath’s work and the way food and mental health are present in it. Her insights span from textual analysis of Plath’s well-known writings to her findings in archives containing work not available to the public. I know this book will be interesting to any who have experienced Plath in a similar way I have and have wondered why her writing seems to resonate so intimately with generations of women with similar struggles.
Throughout the coming weeks we will begin to dive into the editing process. Our first step will be developmental editing, in which we’ll look at the manuscript on a broad scale: structure, general ideas and concepts. As always, you can stay up-to-date with Edits on the Record through subscribing to the blog, or by following our podcast!