There are some books that you read, close, and move on from. And then there are books like The Bell Jar; books that don’t let you go, that sit in your chest like a weight long after you’ve turned the last page. Reading this novel was not just an experience; it was an emotional unraveling, a slow descent into a mind that feels terrifyingly real. 

From the beginning, Esther Greenwood’s voice feels eerily familiar, even if you’ve never been where she is. She’s brilliant, ambitious, and should have everything going for her, but something inside her is breaking. At first, it’s just a crack, small moments of alienation, of feeling like she’s watching life happen from the outside. But then those cracks widen, and before you realize what’s happening, she’s falling. What makes The Bell Jar so powerful is that Plath doesn’t just tell us about Esther’s depression, she makes us feel it. The suffocating weight of expectations, the exhaustion of trying to be the “right” kind of woman, and the slow, creeping numbness make  everything- success, love, and ambition- feel meaningless,

and that’s what makes this book so devastating. 

Esther is not a dramatic or unreliable narrator. She is painfully honest, and that honesty is what makes her descent so terrifying. There’s no clear moment where it all goes wrong. She doesn’t wake up one day and decide she’s depressed. It happens the way it does in real life, gradually, subtly, until one day, she’s standing on the edge and doesn’t know how she got there. 

But what struck me the most was not just Esther’s struggle, it was how the world responded to it. The way people dismissed her pain, the way doctors tried to "fix" her without understanding her, and the way she was expected to just be grateful for the life she had. It made me furious because it’s not just the 1950s. It’s now. It’s the way we still tell people to smile through their sadness, to be thankful when they feel like they’re drowning. It’s the way mental illness is still treated as something to be hidden, controlled, or silenced.

The Bell Jar is not an easy book to read, and it’s not one I would recommend lightly. It is raw, painful, and sometimes unbearable. But it is also necessary. It forces you to sit with emotions

that we’re taught to look away from. It doesn’t offer easy solutions or comforting answers, because real life doesn’t. It simply gives us Esther, and through her, it gives us the truth. And for that, I think everyone should read it.