My Sylvia Plath fandom dates back to the early nineties, when I was in my late teens and randomly pulled The Bell Jar off the shelf at my local library in suburban Salt Lake City. I had never heard of Plath, but there was a section on one shelf containing books by and about her. I was intrigued, and by looking through various biographies, I learned the story of her suicide in 1963. This knowledge would shadow my experience of reading her work for the first time, and as tends to happen with Plath, her life and her work became inseparable.Article continues after advertisement
Reading The Bell Jar had a profound effect on me as both an aspiring fiction writer and as a young woman living in a deeply patriarchal culture. Although the novel takes place in the 1950s, I could relate to the conflict in Esther as she feels her ambition and intelligence crash into the stifling gender roles for women that were available to her, something I felt acutely as well growing up in the conservative religious culture of Utah. Esther’s story, told in her first-person, intimate, confessional voice, enthralled me—I had never read anything like it, and years later I would end up using a similar narrative technique in all three of my novels, including my most recent one, Furious Violet, about a true crime writer whose mother was a Plath-like poet.
