esther is to me as holden was : a mad girl's love song

Sylvia Plath ... what can I say, except for thankyou.

I cannot tell you why it took so long for me to get around to reading your only novel. It spun me out. Turning every page was like a raising away a thin veil on the fist in my brain, just one layer less on the thousands that I need to shed. So Esther is my Holden.

Before I read 'The Bell Jar', I was a little wary. It's considered classic, especially now for teens, and I didn't want to be part of the tribe and overrate something less than. Not so tho. Sylvia Plath is a genius poet, but she's also a genius storyteller. What a privilege to read this novel which is so deeply human. That Plath committed suicide shortly after 'The Bell Jar' was published adds to the bittersweet sense of loss and the longing for it by some ... as Plath herself wrote in her journal:

"To annihilate the world by annihilation of one's self is the deluded height of desperate egoism. The simple way out of all the little brick dead ends we scratch our nails against.... I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb."

This extraordinary work (echoing Plath's own experiences as a rising writer/editor in the early 1950s) chronicles the nervous breakdown of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful, but slowly going under ... but Esther's journey is not morbid or dreary - Plath gives to us a beautiful, tender, haunting piece of art, making it one of the true classics of all time.

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The poem "Mad Girl's Love Song", a beautiful villanelle, appears at the end of the novel and here are the last 2 verses:

I fancied you'd return the way you said, But I grow old and I forget your name. (I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again. I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. (I think I made you up inside my head.)