I don't go around name-dropping Sylvia Plath as a write I enjoy; it's too loaded a statement, and I definitely did enough of that in 7th grade. As a pre-teen, I consumed her writing, including her fiction, letters and diaries, and poetry, and I felt pretty awesome about it -- probably comparable to an Ayn Rand phase. Plath was only 32 when she committed suicide, so in many ways she is a perpetual and eternal young adult, making her writing all the more appealing to the adolescent mind.

By the time I graduated from high school I was very over Sylvia Plath and she seemed immature and melodramatic. It wasn't until a recent re-reading of Ariel that I remembered why I enjoyed her writing so much in the first place. I still wouldn't go so far as call her a favorite author, but I'm also over my cynical late teens/early 20s phase of denouncing everything I used to genuinely enjoy. I have a feeling that Sylvia Plath is an author I'm going to be revisiting, again and again, as I age, and my response to her writing will probably change many more times before I'm done.