Sylvia Plath questioned and wrote the most beautiful poetry, writer Iffat Navaid wrote her biography marveling on her husband’s body-mind – a whole functioning human being reduced to the whims of wits – and wrote such a poignant yet powerful autobiography. This article reviews Pakistan fiction writer Iffat Navaid’s biography.
Arguably, the book can be a testament to what Dr. Kenneth Atchity calls “Dealing with Type C Minds” – C for Creative and C for Crazy. Dr. Kenneth Atchity writes about psychology of creativity: he divides creative productive people into two domains, happy and unhappy. Happy are the ones that know the curve ball a creative process throws: that after completion of one project, the doer is destined to fall into depression like a mother who goes into postpartum depression after that being is out of her womb. In fact, heavily productive people know that this digression into depression will happen, so they keep a steady supply of projects. They happily finish one to get into another and avoid the blues. Unhappy productive people are baffled by the psychology of creativity. This is the reason why you see writers like Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf finding themselves there in the end.
