I grew up loving The Bell Jar. Then I noticed how Sylvia Plath wrote about people that looked like me
After revisiting Plath's book in my early twenties, I ended up writing a novel of my own as a way of understanding the recognition and repulsion I felt
Sixty years after its publication, it's hard to imagine what the world would look like without Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. What would it be like to write a book about a young woman without this totemic touchstone? What would it be like to be a young woman without The Bell Jar?
Plath's 1963 novel unleashed legions of artistic and chronically misunderstood girls on the world, allowing us to be exactly who we already were: highly sensitive, stuck-up, dazzlingly clever, crazy, ambitious, aimless, awkward and depressed. This book has meant everything to girls everywhere to the point where loving Plath and The Bell Jar has become a shorthand for female adolescent rebellion. When I first read The Bell Jar as a teenager, I didn't just identify with Esther Greenwood - I was Esther Greenwood. I felt that I was that lonely, awkward girl with a mania for academic achievement and accumulating prizes for my writing, a covert love for beautiful clothes, a well-meaning but uninspiring boyfriend and a mother who lived her dreams through her daughter.
Like so many other adolescent rites of passage, I came late to The Bell Jar. When I read The Bell Jar for an undergraduate women's writing class, I felt something new, brand new. It took me in from the start with its woozy charm and kidnapped my mind clean away. Which meant that it hurt like hell when she wrote about being yellow as a Chinaman' and worse when a few pages later there was a big, smudgy-eyed Chinese woman ... staring idiotically into my face'. The hurt kept me from reading on for a while. This often happened to me when I was reading books I loved. I felt betrayed because in the most routine, narcissistic, obvious way, I had thought that I was Esther Greenwood.
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