I finally finished reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and now I am petrified that I will just go and hang myself in the woods or crawl into a hole in the basement or have some unwanted shock treatments. The book was a big downer, and even though the author was gifted with an incredible way of seeing things and finding just the exact words to describe them, still I am sorry I ever pulled it down from the dusty shelf where it sat undisturbed for years. Now I'm disturbed.
The Bell Jar starts out as a pretty funny and lighthearted account of a young college student's summer internship at a glamorous New York fashion magazine, although if you know anything about literature going in, you know that Plath eventually committed suicide by sticking her head in an oven. And even if you don't, the book jacket helpfully points out that she died at 31, so you know something is not kosher from the get-go. Soon enough, however, after a few posh parties and fancy book luncheons, we are deep into Sylvia's psychotic breakdown and confinement in a mental asylum, complete with forbidding nurses in starched white uniforms and crazy barefoot patients with unwashed hair and wild eyes and clanking food trays and cold tile floors and sterile machines that jolt your head with electricity like Dr. Frankenstein in his laboratory. It's all there in black and white, as they say, and quite realistically wrought, so if you've never gone crazy and want to know what it's like, this is the ticket.
The Bell Jar starts out as a pretty funny and lighthearted account of a young college student's summer internship at a glamorous New York fashion magazine, although if you know anything about literature going in, you know that Plath eventually committed suicide by sticking her head in an oven. And even if you don't, the book jacket helpfully points out that she died at 31, so you know something is not kosher from the get-go. Soon enough, however, after a few posh parties and fancy book luncheons, we are deep into Sylvia's psychotic breakdown and confinement in a mental asylum, complete with forbidding nurses in starched white uniforms and crazy barefoot patients with unwashed hair and wild eyes and clanking food trays and cold tile floors and sterile machines that jolt your head with electricity like Dr. Frankenstein in his laboratory. It's all there in black and white, as they say, and quite realistically wrought, so if you've never gone crazy and want to know what it's like, this is the ticket. 
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