Authors that have inspired me. Part One: Sylvia Plath

The Bell Jar is a coming of age novel. I read it when I was 16, and yet like some women, I have been obsessed with it for a long time.

This paragraph, is one of the more notable quotes from The Bell Jar.

“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.”

The interesting thing about The Bell Jar, is that it reaches its audience in such a personal way. The images of figs always hit me very hard, because when I was young, and my mom took me and my sister to Greece, I remember the fig trees and eating a lot of figs, and somehow I have always associated figs to my childhood, because since that time, I have rarely eaten any.

When she talks about wrinkled figs that dropped off the tree, I always picture the dried figs that were crammed together, in the form of a circle, and tightly covered with plastic. My mom used to buy those, and I hated them because they never tasted like the fresh figs that we plucked off the trees in Greece.

When I was a little girl, I did not want to ever get married. I hated when I would see my Greek relatives, and the only thing that they would wish for me was to find a good Greek husband. It drove me nuts. All I wanted to be was a famous writer. And then, when I was 12 I wanted to act. And then, in my twenties, I hit a horrible depression, and wanted to act and write, and have a boyfriend and just evaporate from the planet. When I was 21, I wrote a play and it was produced off-off Broadway but I couldn't cope with any of it. An off-Broadway company was interested in my rewriting the play, but I never did.

On opening night, I got drunk inside the lighting booth. After the play closed, I wanted to kill myself. But I didn't. I just hung on, like a worn out towel that had been forgotten on a clothesline,

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

Yeah, it is. It can suck. The idea of being inside a bell jar fills me with terror, and a sense of suffocation. What scares me is I once identified with that feeling that she had.

When I got older, and learned more about Plath and her relationship with Ted Hughes, I developed a sense of anger towards him. Not only did she have this marriage where her husband cheated on her, but I also felt that he was resentful of her talent. She was also a woman who appeared to be torn between her roles as a writer, a wife and a mother.

In today's society, perhaps Plath would have gotten a proper mental health diagnosis, followed by appropriate treatment

My short stories include characters who suffer from mental illness. One of my goals as a writer is to be an advocate for those who suffer from this disorder.

I read somewhere that Plath was bipolar, and that her stark imagery also reveals that she might have been schizophrenic. Its hard to say. I don't like relegating her work into drab clinical terms.

As far as I am concerned, The Bell Jar is a master piece.