The Bell Jar
Once described to me by a bookstore employee as the type of book that makes you want to shower.
(I somehow mean this in the most complimentary way possible).
It’s just that it lingers on your skin. It’s sticky in your brain.
Also have heard it described as the female version of The Catcher in the Rye. I think it was me who said this, though. My brother adamantly agrees with this comparison.
But upon re-reading this book in July of 2026, I have drawn additional conclusions. It’s the only book I’ve re-read, and just as when I first read it, I can’t seem to shake it.
I have become fascinated with Sylvia Plath. Borderline obsessed. Almost as obsessed as she was with death.
Some of her quotes are so relatable it feels like I wrote them.
Do the times ever really change?
If someone tells you are going crazy, you will go crazy. But who is defining crazy? The parameters of what is considered psychotic seem to change with each generation, even with what region of the U.S. you live in. What does it mean to lose your grasp on reality? What even is reality? Yours is not mine is not hers.
It’s her so-called neuroticism that I can’t stop wondering about. She wants so much that she can’t have it all. The fig tree, of course. But it somehow manifests as intense depression. Because then why bother with any of it?
“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
“She wants … to be everything.”
What even are the differences between depression, anxiety, bipolar, borderline personality disorder, OCD? Overlapping features but slightly different presentations. The same drugs to treat them all. Some strange cocktail we have to experiment with, high chances it won’t work, and no clear understanding as to WHY they work (if they do).
“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
Would her work have garnered the same attention if she hadn’t killed herself?
Her anguish, her anger, her pain, her sorrow. Being trapped under that damn bell jar. Always looking through it. Only fleeting moments of having it lifted.
I didn’t know her. Who am I to speculate on her life?
Because sometimes it feels like I did know her.
“That’s one of the reasons I never want to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
She did get married, though. And Ted Hughes has been described as both a dampener and catalyst to her writing, her creativity, her passion. Eventually, Ted left her for another woman. And then, a few months later, when she was thirty years old, she stuck her head in the oven. She had attempted suicide a few times before, and one of the attempts is written about in The Bell Jar. Her two-year-old and one-year old were asleep in the room over when she died.
You can see the scrambling of desires in her poems and journals. The internal conflict. The contradictions.
Am I projecting my own internal messiness onto her?
Even this short paper bounces between different themes of her writing.
Perhaps, Sylvia Plath is not an ideal role model, given how her story ends. But gosh, I wish she had stuck around to write more. I crave to better understand her psyche.
My dad often asks who we would love to sit down for lunch with, living or dead. I think my answer might be Sylvia Plath. If not, then another tortured writer. It seems they have quite a bit in common.