Beejay Silcox
speaker
505 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 2d ago
Beejay Silcox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Mm-hmm.
and taken that as an approach to her writing, which is something that a writer like Colin McCann does as well.
And so what Helen Bain has done is start with December 1962 and then work backwards to 1961
And it's full of chapters of other characters who are in this small town in regional Britain where Sylvia Plath spent the last year or so of her life.
And so the town is called North Taunton.
And so the first chapter, for example, is a woman called Nancy Axworthy closing up the house in which Sylvia Plath had been living.
So it's a story about, you know, the house being cleaned and closed up and what it means to live in this small town.
There's another, actually one of my favourite chapters, and it's a shop girl.
who works in a clothes shop that has extraordinary pretensions to being the place where you might go if you want to be well-dressed.
And it's about this girl who has all of these ambitions.
She's a working-class girl, works in this shop, reads fashion magazines and dreams of going to London.
And one afternoon she has an encounter with this sort of this glamorous figure who steps into her shop and doesn't buy a dress.
And so that's what this novel does again and again.
It takes on the characters around Sylvia Plath, which I think is actually quite a clever way into it.
Ah, yes.
Yes, it's because Highway 13 had that sort of whole feel of grief and potential violence as well as all the sort of tangential feelings
connections that really thrum through that novel.
I mean, like the sound of a distant car on a highway.
So the style is completely different in The Daffodil Days, but what it is alike is in circling this huge cultural moment.
And the other thing that Helen Bain does very well is right at the end, her notes are very good and very detailed.
Showing 401–420 of 505 · page 21 of 26
← Previous
Next →