The Barbizon by Paulina Bren

Author:Paulina Bren [Bren, Paulina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Two weeks after leaving the Barbizon, on July 15, Sylvia came down the stairs of her mother’s home, legs bare. Her mother saw right away the scars on her legs that were neither fresh nor healed. It was clear that her daughter had done this to herself. Sylvia pleaded with her mother: she wanted them to die together right there and then because “the world is so rotten!” Within two hours, Sylvia was being ushered into psychiatric counseling, and at the end of July 1953, electroshock treatments began, in the crudest and cruelest way possible, without anesthetization, so that each shock reverberated through Sylvia’s body, splitting her open just as she believed New York had done to her. In the days that followed, Sylvia wrote to Peggy Affleck, the Mormon in her guest editor cohort. She wanted to know more about the Mormon view of the afterlife, which staked its bets on a parallel life for the soul after the mortal body had perished.

At the end of August, back home again, Sylvia pried open her mother’s metal locker, removed fifty sleeping pills, wrote a note to say that she was going for a long walk and would not be back for a day or so, and folded herself into the crawl space under the house with the pills and a glass of water to help them go down. What happened next would be splashed across national newspapers: a nationwide manhunt for the Smith girl, the talented writer, the Mademoiselle star. It was her brother who would finally find her, beneath the house, still alive despite the pills she had swallowed. It was Sylvia’s first suicide attempt.

She had returned from New York a different person—just not in the way she had hoped. On the one hand, Sylvia adorned herself with all the privilege that came with her particular kind of life; on the other, she eschewed it, tossing all her carefully curated possessions over the side of the Barbizon. Nothing ever lived up to the hype, nothing was ever as good as it should be; the perfection she craved was indeed a fairy tale.

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