I read The Bell Jar for the first time as an adolescent, self-absorbed and resentful and emotionally calloused, in denial about the pain that I was under — ashamed of it. Plath was cathartic. In the parade of white male authors I had buried my nose in, I had obviously encountered nobody until Plath who understood what it meant to be a bright young woman in a small town, and I so desperately needed the validation. She was like a friend to me, and she was also kind of my hero, but only for the wrong reasons. 

I admired Plath for “having the strength to do it.” (Remember, I was like 14.) I remember being obsessed with her, and Woolf, and Sexton, and all these other women who stuffed their coats with stones and jumped into the river and locked themselves in their cars and turned on the gas and stuck their heads in the oven, wondering how my own suicide would be romanticized by the world after I become the damaged female author I believed I was always destined to become. It was not until my own nervous breakdown in 2019 that I realized how fucking stupid that all really sounds.

There are things that I wrote leading up to my first “major” unraveling in 2019 that seems alien to me now. Descriptions of numbness, surreal images, resignation. I had always prided myself in my heightened self-awareness but even then, I would have said nothing was the matter, because as far as I could assess it, everything was normal. I was in a bell jar, see. Waking up wishing I didn’t and praying to get hit by some car some time that day every single day, for me, was just the normal state of things, of which the only way out was death. I could not imagine being happy, and I had accepted that to be true for such a long time. 

But then the bell jar lifted from above me, and I couldn’t believe it but I could feel the sun on my skin again, and the wind on my face, and I can hear it when kids laugh. Of course I knew that the damned thing did not dissipate — it hung above my head like the sword of Damocles — but at least I knew a parallel world existed outside of it, a brighter one.

To re-experience Plath in this state was an experiment, more than anything else. I wondered if I would find it as devastating. I wondered if I could spot which was real in Esther Greenwood’s world, and which was created by her own distorted view from her bell jar.

I actually found it quite funny at the beginning. Depressed as all hell that she was, Plath had an irreverent sense of humor, describing misogynistic experiences with almost satirical quality. I also liked Esther much less than I did the first time. Her relatability and feminist awareness aside, she’s pretty self-absorbed and (this is obviously the product of the 60s but it remains to be said) she’s fatphobic and a little racist. However, I also picked up on things I loved during my second reading that I didn’t really notice the first time. Plath’s men — dismissive, sexist, puritanical — is by far my favorite response to the caricature famous male authors claim are “women” in their works (and Plath is much more accurate, too.)

Of course, when the novel dips, you drown with it. I have then and I still did now. I never had any trouble reading graphic depictions of self-harm, but I think back then, I revered these passages, whereas now I find them truly sad. I also totally forgot how this book ended. I guess the devastation brought by the last sections got the best of me as an adolescent, because I could have sworn it ended in a much more pessimistic note, but it didn’t. In fact, in the end, it seemed Plath was optimistic.

Another thing that I didn’t have back then that I do now is a book club, where we could debrief and discuss and offer comfort and solidarity to each other about what we’ve just read. This was the most voted book of the 14+ books that was suggested, and I wonder if the reason is because we all have this bell jar that rises and falls around us at any time, and we are constantly trying to talk to the outside of it, if only to confirm that it exists at all.

It does. Even Sylvia Plath recognized that, however briefly.