Frieda Hughes (left), the daughter of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, gives her only American interview to promote her own new collection of poems, 45, to Andrea Sachs of Time.com…and since a lot of the poems are about Plath’s death and its impact on the family, so’s the conversation. “You can analyze [my parents] as much as you like, but if you weren’t actually the people themselves… It’s interesting to me that people have been so interested in them,” she observes. “I think one of the reasons out of many of the reasons, apart from the fact they did write some super poetry, and their lives were sadly tragic, I think part of it is that people in a way almost analyze themselves through their subject.”
As a closer, Sachs asks if Hughes thinks today’s anti-depressant medications could have made things better for Plath, and she readily warms to the idea: “The advancements in the past 30- or 40-odd years, are huge. I don’t believe there’s any way that that situation would have arisen now. She’d still be here.”