Read a Girl #27: "The Bell Jar", Sylvia Plath

Hey, you :)

Before we begin, I’d like to take a moment to thank you for staying with me this whole year. I can’t believe we’ve made it. 2020 hasn’t been kind to any of us, so I’m just happy we got through it together. I really appreciate you taking the time to open this newsletter every month when everything around us felt apocalyptical. This was a fantastic year for this little project of mine, with it being named one of the best newsletters of 2020, so thank you, thank you, thank you - this victory is also yours.

To close off this strange year, I’m going with one of the classics. “The Bell Jar”, by the force of nature that was Sylvia Plath. OK, I know, not the “cheery” read type, but still. This is a book I only read as an adult, but one that came into my life at a moment in which I needed to read it.

The book tells the story of Esther Greenwood, a young woman with a promising future who gets a summer internship at a prominent magazine in New York City. But despite being on track to have a somewhat “happy and normal” life, Esther is depressed and we get to watch while her mental health slowly deteriorates. 

As The New Yorker wrote upon the book’s publication in the US in the 1970s, “pain and gore are endemic” to the story. But however frightening “The Bell Jar” is, it is still a story about the hurdles some of us go through in order to find out who we are.

My first book, “a spectacularly sad ending”, is a collection of poetry and prose about heartbreak, loss and survival. It chronicles experiences of love, loss, abuse and grief, and is for anyone who is or ever had to mend a broken heart. It's available as a paperback and also on Kindle. You can get it here.

🎵 This newsletter was written to the sounds of “The Only Thing”, by Sufjan Stevens.

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My name is Renata and I am the Founder and Editor of Read a Girl, a platform aimed at promoting the work of women writers. My background is in journalism and I spent most of my career covering foreign affairs and travelling around looking for good stories to tell. Reading is a very big passion of mine and my favourite authors are Elena Ferrante, J.D. Salinger, Julian Barnes and Sylvia Plath.

You can learn more about me here and on my website.

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