The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

The tone of this novel in one sentence.

I didn’t know shorthand either. This meant I couldn’t get a good job after college. My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.

Finally I decided that if it was so difficult to find a red-blooded intelligent man who was still pure by the time he was twenty-one I might as well forget about staying pure myself and marry somebody who wasn’t pure either. Then when he started to make my life miserable I could make his miserable as well.

At that rate, I’d be lucky if I wrote a page a day. Then I knew what the trouble was. I needed experience. How could I write about life when I’d never had a love affair or a baby or even seen anybody die? A girl I knew had just won a prize for a short story about her adventures among the pygmies in Africa. How could I compete with that sort of thing?

Main reason I haven‘t written anything (substantial) yet.

I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.

So I looked up the requirements for English majors at the city college where my mother taught. They were even worse. You had to know Old English and the History of the English Language and a representative selection of all that had been written from Beowulf to the present day.

Only my case was incurable. I had bought a few paperbacks on abnormal psychology at the drugstore and compared my symptoms with the symptoms in the books, and sure enough, my symptoms tallied with the most hopeless cases. The only thing I could read, besides the scandal sheets, were those abnormal-psychology books. It was as if some slim opening had been left, so I could learn all I needed to know about my case to end it in the proper way.

Mid-20th-century equivalent of a google self-diagnosis.