45. The Bell Jar

45. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (2/3/12 -- 2/9/12)

Since I am familiar with Sylvia Plath's life story, I was expecting this book to be really depressing.  After all, The Bell Jar is largely autobiographical, and Sylvia Plath suffered from major depression for years and finally killed herself when she was 30 by sticking her head in an oven.

But I think going into this book with that knowledge helped make it a lot less depressing.  That's not to say that this story isn't difficult, emotionally, to read; Esther Greenwood, the main character, is gradually spiraling into a black hole of depression and this book chronicles her experiences, many of which are both totally realistic and shocking, and  of course frightening in the accuracy of their description.  I've read before that experts have recognized many diagnostic symptoms of schizophrenia in the works of Sylvia Plath, so even though she was never officially diagnosed, she was most likely writing from her own experience of this disorder.

The plot itself is not so important as is the character of Esther Greenwood.  At first, she seems like a quiet, rather awkward young woman who is working on a scholarship job in New York.  But as that job ends and she goes back to her life and home, as she gets turned down for jobs and classes she applied for, as she struggles to find a career that she will find emotionally satisfying, she fades.  Before long, she is seeing things and having fits and ultimately tries to kill herself -- which ends up putting her into a mental hospital.

I don't want to give away the ending; the book is definitely worth reading.  But there is something eerie about this book, especially for me as an aspiring writer. Writing is something that Esther loves and that she is reasonably good at; she can see the connections between things expanding in her mind's eye in a way that is startlingly familiar to a writer like me.  So, even though I know I'm not depressed or anything else that she is, the mental impact of that is a little shocking.