The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath, 1963
★ 4.04 from 1.3m ratings on Goodreads
A gifted student's slide into depression, told with a comedian's timing and unnerving exactness about what it feels like to stop feeling. Witty, exact sentences carry you through dread and wonder as the narrator's mind narrows and slips.
Feels like dread, wonder and melancholy. About madness, ambition and love.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you want a sharp, first-person account of ambition and mental illness with a dark comic edge. Be aware that it includes recurring racist, homophobic, and fatphobic remarks, and its bleakness can feel exhausting.
Why read it
Its unnerving precision about depression and its wit make it worth reading as a portrait of a gifted mind under pressure.
A page from the book
Every life you might have lived, hanging ripe and out of reach.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. What readers say
Readers are often moved and unsettled by the vivid descent into depression, and many connect personally to its isolation and gender pressures. Others are angered by recurring racist, homophobic, and fatphobic content, and some find the bleakness exhausting or self-indulgent.
Sylvia Plath.It appeared in January 1963 under the pen name 'Victoria Lucas'; Plath's own name went on it only after her death the following month.
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Questions readers ask
- Is The Bell Jar for me?
- You may like it if you want a sharp, first-person account of ambition and mental illness with a dark comic edge. Be aware that it includes recurring racist, homophobic, and fatphobic remarks, and its bleakness can feel exhausting.
- What is The Bell Jar like?
- Witty, exact sentences carry you through dread and wonder as the narrator's mind narrows and slips. Feels like dread, wonder and melancholy. About madness, ambition and love.
- What should I read after The Bell Jar?
- If you liked The Bell Jar, try The Secret History (Donna Tartt), Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) and The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Stephen Chbosky).
A taste of the feed
The idea that a life has one crack running down it, decided in advance.
DOES SUCH a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
The Secret History · Donna Tartt
A mind wakes up with no history, and nobody to ask.
“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
Frankenstein · Mary Shelley
The difference between being someone's crush and being seen.
It’s just that I don’t want to be somebody’s crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don’t want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it too. I want them to be able to do whatever they want around me. And if they do something I don’t like, I’ll tell them.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower · Stephen Chbosky
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