Lee Kravetz’s agent begged him not to become a novelist. With his first two books of non-fiction, his career as a reliable psychological journalist was cemented. But after reading the manuscript for Kravetz’s novel The Last Confessions of Sylvia P., his agent said he couldn’t go back to non-fiction.

In their first book, Supersurvivors, Kravetz and co-author David B. Feldman interviewed people who experienced incredible accomplishments following seemingly insurmountable traumas. In his follow-up, Strange Contagion, he examined the physiological, psychological and social factors that combined to cause five Palo Alto high school students to commit suicide over a six-month period in 2009.

This Tuesday, Kravetz joins novelist Meg Waite Clayton (The Wednesday Sisters) to discuss his first novel, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P, in an online event hosted by Menlo Park’s Kepler’s Literary Foundation.

Kravetz has a gentle hand when it comes to heavy subjects and he pairs it with some old-school optimism. Coming out of the pandemic, he sees people changing for the better. He points to catastrophe and the brevity of life as glaring reminders that what society once considered normal is no longer viable.

“There is growth within trauma. Somebody experiences something really scary in life and they don’t just bounce back, they bounce forward and end up changing their lives in really remarkable ways,” he says.

Kravetz’s path to novel writing involved journalism and psychology, and poetry had a big impact as well, but the book didn’t come from a place of bookish research. It came instead from his post-graduate work at a psychiatric hospital in Menlo Park—the very same hospital Ken Kesey worked in when he began to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It was there that Kravetz rediscovered Plath’s classic The Bell Jar, a fictional account of her time in psychiatric care at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts.

In the 1950s, Plath attended poetry workshops under Robert Lowell and alongside Anne Sexton, forming a foundation of confessional poets, who catalyzed vulnerable, visceral poetry like no one before them. At 30 years old, Plath took her own life not knowing the impact her work would have on generations to come. Kravetz’s story longs to go back in time and give her hope.

The Last Confessions is a social and temporal triangulation around Sylvia Plath and her journey through depression and expression. Through the confessions of three composite characters, based on Plath’s influences at different times, it reveals a woman of the 1950s living with what we now know to be bipolar disorder, who is also a poet with a sharply focused lens on everything outside of herself.

Kravetz’s views on our collective mental health takes a page out of Plath’s poetic acknowledgment of her own mental state

“100% of us are experiencing a collective trauma right now. Everyone needs to acknowledge what they’re experiencing,” he says. “Having gone through the last two years and to walk away going, ‘Oh! We’re fine!’ is just denying the reality of the fact.”

Still, he remains optimistic, urging more open conversation on the pain brought about in these years of upheaval and isolation.

“We should have a billboard campaign across the entire country, and on every bus and on every TV show: You Need To Seek Help. Everybody Does.”

Like most of us, the pandemic has taken him to some dark places.

“To say that you haven’t or to not really talk about that, whether it’s through poetry or through art, or even through a therapist or to a friend, you’re doing yourself a huge disservice.”

But he doesn’t see any reason to give up hope.

“There’s a legitimate scientific formula for hope. As long as you have a goal (the city that you’re moving toward), the agency (the car you’re driving), and the pathway (the road you’re driving on), then you’ve got hope.”

As a novel, The Last Confessions is part ode, part dirge. Moreso, it is a fugue for the dawn of confessional poetry and therapeutic metaphor for our collective madness. Though he’s now writing fiction, Kravetz has no intention of leaving the real world out of his stories; he’s just making sure they all include a little map toward hope.

Lee Kravetz
Tue, 6pm, Free
Kepler’s Books, Online Event