Read This!: The Bell Jar

By Sylvia Plath

Book challenge: Author who only wrote one book

Mr. read this in 2010 (his review here) and really liked it and I needed a book for the challenge for author who only wrote one book and decided to go for it. I realize this is kind of cheating because Sylvia Plath wrote other books but those are poetry. This is her only novel.

Mr. did a good job on the synopsis so I will keep it short and you can reference his blog post if you want something more in depth. My review does contain some spoilers. You were warned.

When The Bell Jar starts, Esther Greenwood is an intern at a women’s magazine in New York. It is the summer before her last year of college. Told from her point of view, Esther is sarcastic and apathetic during her time there. As the internship ends, Esther becomes more and more detached and sinks into a deep depression at her home in Boston. Here she makes several suicide attempts and eventually finds herself in a mental hospital where she undergoes treatments. Eventually, she comes out of her depression but always has in the back of her mind the fear of not knowing when she will find herself again in “the bell jar”.

I found this book so interesting and I have to say I loved it. Though the book is generally not humorous, it did make me laugh at times such as when Esther talked about how she never knows how much to tip people so just avoids those situations. I live that every time I travel. Sylvia Plath suffered from depression and you can see that in the way Esther conveys being mentally ill, the detachment, her reality while she is in her depression, the wish that her illness was in her body because then everything would be ok but instead it is in her head, the way that her mother makes comments like she knew she would just snap out of it because one can just choose not to be mentally ill of course, the anxiety of not knowing when the depression will hit again.

The other thing that I found so interesting was the shock treatments and insulin therapy that Esther suffers through. I don’t know if those actually worked as I am not an authority in the history of medicine but yikes!

This is my favorite book that I have read this year so far. I highly recommend.