I love the book and still read it, almost like a book of poetry, usually before bed. I love her dry wit, cynicism and prosey writing.

Fascinating to me- but hardly ever discussed- is that Plath killed herself a month after publishing it under a pseudonym. She was living alone with her two kids, divorcing, unemployed in the dead of winter. I think she wrote it for money, then took her name off it because of the similarities to her real life (she wasn't a complete unknown at that time). There was some talk of the book selling fairly well at the time of publication).

Some Psychologists who have read her writings now believe she was schizophrenic, not manic-depressive or bi-polar like originally thought. Passages where she has tunnel vision or hears voices or sees things in distortion or hallucinates.

"The book contains many references to real people and events in Plath's life. Plath's real-life magazine scholarship was at Mademoiselle magazine beginning in 1953. Furthermore, Philomena Guinea is based on Plath's own patron, author Olive Higgins Prouty, who funded Plath's scholarship to study at Smith College. Plath was rejected from a Harvard course taught by Frank O'Connor. Dr. Nolan is thought to be based on Plath's own therapist, Ruth Beuscher, whom she continued seeing after her release from the hospital. A good portion of this part of the novel closely resembles the experiences chronicled by Mary Jane Ward in her autobiographical novel The Snake Pit; Plath later stated that she had seen reviews of The Snake Pit and believed the public wanted to see "mental health stuff," so she deliberately based details of Esther's hospitalization on the procedures and methods outlined in Ward's book. Plath was a patient at McLean Hospital, an upscale facility which resembled the "snake pit" much less than certain wards in the Metropolitan State Hospital, which may have been where Mary Jane Ward was actually hospitalized.

In a 2006 interview, Joanne Greenberg said that she had been interviewed in 1986 by one of the women who had worked on Mademoiselle with Plath in the college guest editors group. The woman claimed that Plath had put so many details of the students' real lives into The Bell Jar that "they could never look at each other again," and that it had caused the breakup of her marriage and possibly others."

One haunting anecdote I read one time is that she had visited a friend then left. When he went out into the hall for something about ten minutes later she was still standing there, having never moved.

There's about a dozen references to lesbianism in The Bell Jar, which makes me wonder about Plath's sexuality. She kills-off the lesbian character Joan, when in real life the person Joan is based on went on to become a successful Psychotherapist or Psychiatrist (I forget which). The irony...