Jared Harris credited as playing...
Al Alvarez
- Al Alvarez: Look. One thing I do know about death is it is not a reunion or a homecoming. There's - there's no - your life doesn't flash before you and the missing piece of you clicks into place. It's just - there's just "fuck all"! There's nothing.
- Sylvia: So, what do you do when your life get's as bad as it can and just keeps getting worse?
- Al Alvarez: You just keep going.
- Al Alvarez: Sylvia, I know this must have been hard on you.
- Sylvia: No. I've never been happier and I've never written more. Its as if, now he's gone, I'm free. I can finally write. I wake up between three and four, cause that's the worst time, and I write till dawn. I really feel like God is speaking through me.
- Al Alvarez: Extraordinary. And Lady Lazarus - the one about the failed suicides. The despair. The overpowering sense of foreboding and, yet, without a trace of anger or hysteria or any appeal for sympathy. The - the wealth of imagery. Such horrors; but, expressed with a coolness. Like a - a murderer's confession.
- Al Alvarez: Have you got a title for your novel yet?
- Sylvia: The Bell Jar.
- Al Alvarez: When is it coming out?
- Sylvia: The new year.
- Al Alvarez: Are you going to let me read it?
- Sylvia: It's a pot boiler.
- Al Alvarez: They're all bloody civil servants moonlighting as journalists. It's their job to protect the status quo.
- Al Alvarez: That Daddy poem, the use of metaphor, the way it builds the end out blackness into an explosion of fury. But, it's just - stunning.
- Sylvia: Could you get me an ashtray?
- Al Alvarez: Sure. I didn't know you smoked.
- Sylvia: I don't. But, I'm starting. I'm thinking of trying some new things.
- Sylvia: I'm thinking of taking a lover.
- Al Alvarez: Oh, how glamorous. Who is he?
- Sylvia: [Sylvia stares at Al, half-smiling]