My favorite response was a simple 'it made me feel less alone.' Because that's how it made me feel, too. Laid in bed for three days just to be sure.' 'I read it right before senior year & loved it so much I thought I was going crazy too. 'All the pages fell out of my copy, the book literally lost hope & gave up on itself,' said one. I asked my Twitter followers, many of them women with histories of angst and an ability to speak eloquently and even comically about it, to spare 140 characters on the topic of The Bell Jar and what it meant to them. Would she have been a riot grrrl, embracing an angry feminist aesthetic? Addicted to Xanax? A blogger for Slate? Would she, like me, have found a cosy coffeehouse environment on the internet, a way to connect with people who understood her aesthetic and validated her experience? Would she have been less dependent on the approval of viewers and critics and more aware of the positive effect her book was having on splintered psyches and girls with short bangs everywhere? Or would that kind of connectedness and access to unmitigated and misspelled negativity have driven her even madder?

I wonder if Plath would have been saved had she been born in a different time: in a time when psycho-pharmacologists are no more shameful to visit than hairdressers and women write celebrated personal essays about being bad mothers and cutters and are reclaiming the word slut. I had a recording of Sylvia reading her poem 'The Thin People' that occasionally came on when I put my iPod on shuffle, abruptly bringing any party atmosphere to a halt. I could only begin to imagine the pressures that weighed on Sylvia Plath (child rearing, marital distress, bitter London cold) but her work had a normalising effect on my emotional life and her use of language in her poetry and prose, rhythmic, angry, injecting volatile emotion into a myriad of SAT words, rang in my head as I walked to class or drifted off at 4am.įor a 'free form' class project in senior year I did a quiz show-style performance piece based on her life ('Ted Hughes cheated on Sylvia Plath: True or False?') and my final paper in my 20th-century Poetics class compared her work to that of Alanis Morissette ('Angry Girls: Alanis and Sylvia face off'). Although I firmly catalogued myself as 'anxious but not depressed', I was inexorably drawn to the work of women who existed on the lip of a complete and utter nervous breakdown. My focus through most of college was 'confessional female poets' with an emphasis on those who had committed suicide.

The bell jar book