The Silent Woman (Janet Malcolm)

Janet Malcolm’s brilliant, biased, and bitchy (complimentary, mostly) 1995 survey of the many, many Sylvia Plath biographies and memoirs that appeared in the first decades after her death. She interrogates biography itself, has high-stakes lunches and coffees with a bunch of the biographers and Plath’s friends and acquaintances, plays four-dimensional chess with Ted Hughes’s sister/champion, Olwyn the tigress - it’s scholarly and dishy and very, very readable. The retro poetry potboiler of the summer.