I didn’t really check what The Bell Jar was about when I bought it. It was one of those spontaneous bookstore moments during a seasonal discount event. I saw it on the shelf, recognized the title, and thought, “Why not?” I only knew it was a well-known classic, and when I checked Goodreads, I saw that more than a million readers had already read it. That alone convinced me it would be a good addition to my physical book collection.

As I began reading, the story grew heavier and more unsettling with every chapter. I kept wondering what Sylvia Plath wanted to convey through the title The Bell Jar and slowly, it started to make sense. The book feels painfully realistic, as if she’s holding up a mirror to society and to herself.

Plath’s writing captures the suffocating pressure of the world around Esther Greenwood, the protagonist, who slowly spirals into depression. What makes it even more haunting is how close the story feels to Plath’s own life. Knowing her struggles with mental health, and how her story ended, makes Esther’s journey feel even more fragile and real. Many have said it’s almost autobiographical, and I can understand why.

It’s an unforgettable novel, written with a poet’s sensitivity to language and a keen eye for detail. Among all the portrayals of depression I’ve read, The Bell Jar remains one of the most haunting and one that lingers in my mind after I close the book.

My Favorite Bits

• 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 a 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 Europe and Africa and South America, 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. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

• If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.

• I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, “This is what it is to be happy.”

• To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.

• I couldn’t see the point of getting up. I had nothing to look forward to.

• The floor seemed wonderfully solid. It was comforting to know I had fallen and could fall no farther.

• I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come.

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