36. The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath’s Tragedy

0:00I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children. And another fig was a famous children. And another fig was a famous poet. And another fig was a brilliant professor. And another fig was E.G., the amazing editor. And another fig was Europe and Africa and South America. And another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions. And another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion. And beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of

0:51this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest. And as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and one by one they plopped to the ground at my feet. Hello everybody. So that is a very celebrated passage from The Bell Jar by the poet Sylvia Plath. And Plath published it in Britain in January 1963. She published it initially under a pen name, Victoria Lucas. And it was published just weeks before she took her own life. And we will be talking about that. Obviously, it's quite a tragic story. And if you have small children in

1:37the car or something, be warned that it's... It's quite disturbing content, I think. Yeah, it could be. This episode is brought to you by Klarna. When I finish the final chapter, I often find that I have more questions at the end than I started with. What happens next? Why did the story end there? But you know, Tabby, it's hard to make time to ponder big questions like that because I'm always getting bogged down in kind of boring day-to-day admin. But that's where Klarna comes in. Their free app helps you stay on top of your money admin so you have more time to answer the unanswerable. Do you know what? It's even easier now because everything about your money is in one scrollable view. So what you use most at the top and absolutely nothing slips by.

2:24And their app has built in buyers protection and day and night assistance. So you can feel confident when you shop. Now your everyday spending, your payments and your card are all together and in your control. Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money so that you can think about, well, anything else. Hi, this is Gary Lineker from Goal Hangers. The rest is football. This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises along the way.

3:10Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees. So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee, and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart, get wise, T's and C's apply. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? Zepbound Terzepatide may be able to help. Zepbound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity

3:55or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. Zepbound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. Zepbound contains terzepatide and should not be used with other terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if Zepbound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop, zip bound and call your doctor

4:37if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia, if you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit zepbounce.lily.com. So the book wasn't published in the United States until 1971, but it became a sensation in the 1970s and 80s, became a kind of great feminist classic and to some extent the book is a roman

5:25acclay so it's a disguised autobiography by sylvia plath talking about a lot of her own experiences growing up and as you get a sense of it from that opening reading it's about a young woman very bright young woman who is um suffocating um under the weight of her anxiety and her depression. She wants to fulfill her ambitions. She has all kinds of ideas about what she might become, as we can tell in that reading, the kind of branching fig tree. Yeah, the figs. But she's in 1950s America, and she feels stifled by the expectations of her society. And this sort of internal battle, this uncertainty, this search for a sort of a role and for meaning takes her to some very dark places indeed, doesn't it, Abby? raw unflinching take on mental illness on depression and also simultaneously this idea

6:27of female rage against societal convention against patriarchy and it's become in the years since this publication I think probably still is wouldn't you say a subversive cult classic and Sylvia Plath herself I mean she's a literary. She's almost become a posthumous cultural luminary. She's so famous, more famous than her work almost, I think. You know, she's sort of been deified. Or Virginia Woolf, actually, is a good comparison to a writer who you might see on a t-shirt. Yeah, definitely. That's very, very true. But it's a mystique born not only of her book of her poetry but also i think probably um the romanticization of her very tumultuous marriage to ted hughes another famous british poet um her tortured inner life you know her depression and then also her tragic early death

7:22at only 30 i think it's sort of being sensationalised, maybe arguably slightly overshadowing her work and who she actually was, but we'll discuss that a bit more later. Before we do so, what did you make of it, Dominic? Because I often try to make a prediction for what you will think of a book that we do. Yeah, and I actually didn't really know what to think this time please tell me tabby that i sometimes surprise you that i'm not utterly predictable you actually often surprise me i have to say it pains me to say it oh that's that's what that's good to know well the point of reading is to be open-minded isn't it and to surprise yourself that's definitely not something anyone could accuse you of is kind of being closed-minded i think or predictable oh thank

8:04you wow we should we should end the podcast here this is great totally I think sort of leaning into my stereotype or my caricature a bit if I'm allowed to do that to be clear Tabby you it's unbelievable that you started branding me as toad toad hall when actually in the episode you said I was rat I know you are right and you made me very happy with that yeah Yeah. No, but to be honest, I hadn't read it because for the reason that so many men don't read these kinds of books, because basically a lot of men think it's not really for me. It's a feminist classic. And the branding of the book positions it very much as a book for sort of anxious women. I mean, that sounds like a mad thing to say. Yeah, I don't think you're wrong, though.

8:43But anyway, I read it and I really enjoyed it. I read it on holiday. It's an odd holiday read. that sounds like a mad thing to say and yeah i don't think you're wrong though but anyway i read it and i really enjoyed it i read on a holiday it's an odd holiday read but i loved it actually i loved the portrait of 50s america i thought as you say raw is the word that also plays into the stereotype slightly doesn't it of course it underplays the artistry of the book yeah i think and the skill with which it is written but i found it i thought it was moving i thought it was very evocative you know it's an odd thing to say for a book about depression and a book about some very dark things but i really enjoyed it and i thought she wrote

9:15i thought thought silver plath wrote about depression the narrative voice the way she conveyed it i i thought was extremely skillful um and very well handled yeah i actually agree and i don't think that you're um sort of totally off base when you say you thought it would be a book about kind of female anxiety whatever i had actually certainly avoided the bell jar because i thought it would make me feel a bit depressed i thought it would like it was all about teen angst and and i just didn't know if i kind of you know sometimes they things leave their imprint and i was like oh god i don't know if i can bear it i think i was so wrong i think to to read it as just that is to flatten the belgian and also sylvia plath as just anxiety and depression

9:56and psychological torment because yeah the subject subject matter of the book is bleak but actually the book is not it's quite bright like the colors of the book is bleak but actually the book is not it's quite bright like the colors of the book are quite bright i love the voice of the narrator esther greenwood because she's cynical and wry and self-knowing i actually found so many parts of the book really funny um unexpectedly i think path is a is a great sharp writer she always cuts off the fat the characterization of the different people very skillfully done i also think you know i love lots of people love books about kind of 50s america and we'll talk about this and i think she evokes that world really well yeah but also i do think i

10:36can see why it means so much to so many people because certainly the first half of the book i think is surely relatable to most young people who are trying to you know work out what they want to do. Maybe they've been in institutions, realizing that the world doesn't just kind of play ball with dreams or whatever. Yeah. But particularly, I think, for the female adolescent adolescence of 50s America. Just to give people a sense of the context, it's set in the summer of 1953. This incredibly well-known opening line, a brilliant line, by the way. So good. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. And we'll just talk about that line a little bit in a second.

11:13So we are in Eisenhower's America, Cold War America, less than a decade after the end of the Second World War. This is the era of the affluent society. You know, America is booming. Massive cars, big fridges, all of that sort of thing. But it's also the world of McCarthyism. So McCarthy, the red scares, reds under the beds, search for communist enemies within. And I think the tendency among a lot of writers now is to slightly overdo the discussion of this as a world that is so repressive and terrible and suffocating and all this kind of thing. I mean, it's a world in which most people are better off than anybody else on the planet and are better off than anybody in history has ever been. So there's definitely a lot of good things about 1950s America as well as the bad things.

11:58Yeah, because it's also the post-war boom, isn't it? It is the post-war boom. And people who tend to write about this in the context of Sylvia Plath, so for example, one of her biographers, Heather Clark, says this is a repressive Cold War America that could drive even the best minds of a generation crazy. I mean, how true is that? You know, it's obviously a world in which a lot of people are going to university in greater numbers than ever before. They have opportunities that nobody has ever had. However, you know, there is perhaps a sort of conformity to it. It's quite a conservative society and one in which, in particular, women, young women, sort of can be stifling expectations of them and the roles that they're going to play.

12:34You know, this is the absolute peak of the post-war nuclear family. You know, people are getting married extremely young. There is an expectation that, you know, woman will be the the perfect kind of housewife and mother the kind of kitchen goddess and all of this kind of thing so there's a tension i suppose in this book as in so many fictional portraits of 50s america between on the one hand the bright breezy you know the world of the prom and of the diner and of the white picket fence and everybody in these lovely massive dresses it's like suburban prosperity isn't it you know you get that image of the the see you later honey and the guy leaves completely case the wife completely looking with pearls coiffed hair

13:15waving him off exactly that and i know this is a it's from a few years later but the world of mad men the opening series of mad men yeah that's a good point. Sort of Don and Betty Draper, that sort of world. But obviously Sylvia Plath in this book is slightly pushing against that. So you described it as subversive. I mean, this is a book written by somebody who feels like an outsider, who finds a lot of this stuff repressive, who does find it repressive. Yeah. Does find it... Stifling. Yeah, exactly. And actually that takes us back to the opening line the opening line it was a queer sultry summer the summer they electrocuted the rosenbergs julius and ethel rosenberg accused of betraying the u.s giving secrets to the soviet

13:56union and stuff so there you have the dark side i guess right there in the opening line you have the the thing that she reaches for is something that tells you about her view of that society and of the sort of ugliness of it i guess the suspicion or the paranoia or the violence throughout the book i think that there's a tension between that and then there's the the massive meals and the cars and the sort of consumerist sort of world that's queaky clean aesthetic isn't it bright colors so it's one of a number of books sort of consumerist sort of world that's squeaky clean aesthetic isn't it bright colors so it's one of a number of books sort of set in the 50s there's like the stories of john

14:30cheever or something or have you read revolutionary road tabby i i've never read it but i know of it because that's also doing the same thing isn't it it's showing the dark side to the domestic i don't know prosperity or pleasantness of that and. And the same thing with a woman, a young woman who was chafing at the expectations. And motherhood and stuff like that. But as Sylvia Plath's protagonist in this is chafing as she did in real life. But we will get on to Plath in a second. First of all, just a very quick plot rundown for people that aren't familiar with the book. And actually, it's no coincidence that the plot is strikingly similar to Plath's own life. So the protagonist is Esther Greenwood.

15:12She is clever, high achieving. She's 19 years old. She's a 19 year old undergraduate student. And for the first quarter of the book, she's in New York because she's won this prestigious summer internship at a ladies magazine. Thanks to her wealthy benefactor. I love this name, Philomena Guinea. New York because she's won this prestigious summer internship at a ladies magazine thanks to her wealthy benefactor I love this name Philomena Guinea he's the writer of um crap women's fiction but that's technical uh that's crap that's technical literary term but rather than feel excited and happy like she says in the very earliest pages I was supposed to be having the time of my life she feels weirdly dull and empty and anxious and she is overwhelmed by the work which her peers seem to love she finds the fashion world repellently

15:51artificial yeah and materialistic she feels that herself and the and the girls that she's with are sort of objectified wherever they go um she makes friends with this sardonic quite fun girl called Doreen who she goes to loads of parties and stuff with but itardonic, quite fun girl called Doreen, who she goes to loads of parties and stuff with, but it all ends up quite badly. Another thing is, though, to say, Esther is, while she's chafing against this society and its constrictions and its traditions, she is also still an American teen. So she's thinking about conventional things like losing her virginity. She's thinking about the Yale prom. All the while, though, she's disintegrating. And she starts to reject all of these sort of stepping stones

16:33or kind of the furniture of American adolescence, for instance, signified by the fact that at one point she throws all of the gorgeous clothes that she's got from this internship off a roof in New York. I would never do that. Off the roof, exactly. But you can see that she's like, right, that's it. I'm rejecting this artificial materialism. But I think that's very nicely done, the fact that she's torn between the two things, because that's how normal people think. You're never like just one thing or the other. You might be tempted by this particular world and at the same time repulsed by it. Yeah, of course. And deep down, we all want to fit in no matter how unhappy or anything we are yeah agreed completely so then she goes back doesn't she to new england to her

17:14small town uh her father is dead she lives with her mum and it's there that actually um she really starts to become undone and there's this moment that i think is in many ways the turning point of the book. We might talk about this passage later because I think it's actually brilliantly written. When she finds out that she hasn't made it onto a writing course. And this is just like, I mean, she says it's like being punched in the stomach. She feels that basically she has been a bright girl, a massive achiever, and she's done really well in school. And then she feels, oh my God, you know, that's led to nothing. That's basically what that's going to lead to is a boring suburban marriage to this boring suburban boyfriend who has the unimprovable name of Buddy Willard.

17:57He's such a snore, honestly. I have no time for Buddy. He's a medical student, isn't he? Which means that he's very eligible. You know, her mum is very keen that they keep together. Yeah. He's absolutely going to be the man who leaves with the briefcase. Yeah. First thing in the morning and then comes home and says, honey, I'm home. What's for dinner? Meatloaf, honey. I was just about to say it will be meatloaf. You just know it's meatloaf. It's at this point that I think we first get the metaphor of the bell jar. Yeah, it is. The idea of the sort of suffocating, the kind of cloche or whatever descending over you and this is a sort of this is the the obviously the metaphor that really defines the book the idea of suffocating and being trapped and she sinks

18:35into depression uh the depression gets worse she thinks about um suicide she goes through this extremely traumatic course of electroshock therapy. Again, I have to say a brilliant passage. Not overdone, almost quite understated, and yet still, again, I think we'll talk about that passage later. And yet so visceral, so shocking. Listeners be warned because some people may find this very distressing. She tries to kill herself by overdosing on sleeping pills. She wakes up in hospital. And then the last part of the book is about her time in a mental institution. And this obviously sticks in a lot of readers' minds. It's based on the McLean Hospital where Sylvia Plath herself was hospitalized. And actually, all the stuff we've talked about pretty much happened to Sylvia Plath.

19:26So it's a novel, and it's written with a novelist's craft, and yet obviously in some ways this is Booker's and work of autobiography, isn't it, Tabby? It's a thinly veiled autobiography of a very particular period in Sylvia Plath's life. But beyond the bell jar, we can get such a strong sense of her, stronger than so many of the writers that we've done on the show because she was a prolific writer she wrote letters so many of which we have we still have and journals many of which we also still have she wrote she started writing her journals when she was 11 and kept it up pretty much constantly didn't she and kept it up pretty much until her death yeah the thing that really came across to me,

20:05and which I was delighted by, was she was a woman of really powerful appetite. It was as though she wanted to experience all of life. You know, she loved literature. She loved romance. She loved colours. She loved nature, actually. I think that's been slightly underplayed. Element of Sophia Plath. And she loved food. So her friends, I know, her friends always used to moan that she would eat and eat and eat and eat. She was always hungry, but she never gained weight. And one of her absolute favorites was a deluxe peanut butter sandwich spiced with onion, mayonnaise and bacon, which I think sounds abhorrent. So American. I think that's so American. It's like that mad thing that americans do where they will mix sweet and savory and this is worthy of patrick bateman this dish yeah it is

20:51what is it mayonnaise peanut butter mayonnaise and peanut butter together is insane crazy mayonnaise peanut butter with onion mainly oh yeah bacon what the bacon doing in there deranged it's so this is the kind of stuff that you remember when we went to that diner when we were on tour in America? I remember it well. And I asked for biscuits and gravy because I was curious. This was an extraordinary moment. It was a vast trough full of this white sludge. Anyway, it's best not to recall. Food aside, the other thing that really comes across about Plath is that she could be very catty. She could be quite bitchy, particularly about women, actually. Women that she felt sort of threatened by. She could be quite bitchy, particularly about women,

21:25actually, women that she felt sort of threatened by. That comes through in the first part. That comes through in the Belger. But she was extraordinarily witty. You get the sense that she's sort of always willing to be more emotionally exposed than I think most people probably are. And physically, she was tall, very tall, slender. She was quite elegant. And she was ambitious from a young age and extremely industrious. So she's doggedly determined to be a successful writer. She published her first poem when she was eight. And in fact, she was something of a literary prodigy. And when they tested her IQ, they found that she was actually a genius. She had an amazing capacity to kind of overcome

22:01rejection. She had so many rejections one journal rejected her one of her poems 45 times or something 45 yeah that's a lot of times a lot of times and she was very careful with money she's very sort of organized but you do get the sense a bit like Esther in the novel she struggles to square this sense of herself as an ambitious writer an ambitious young woman with the other things that she seems to want which is kind of love and romance the desire to fit in and kind of be glamorous and because that's another thing that comes out again and again in her journals is the search for romantic love an equal who won't undermine her who won't kind of steal her thunder and will kind of allow her hopes and dreams and she often felt incomplete and off balance and

22:46insecure without a man she was a prolific dater um so she wrote which i think is so witty wittily written oh how agreeable i am that i need 50 blazing brutes to tell me so you know how wonderfully self-knowing she kind of needed romantic validation despite you know her search for independence it's likely why she ended up choosing ted h Hughes, a man who she probably thought would share her ambitions. And we'll talk about that in a sec, because that's surely one of the most famous or iconic literary marriages of all time, wouldn't you say? Of course, I would indeed. But just to sketch her background a second. She's born in Boston, Massachusetts. She's a New Englander. Her mother was the daughter of an Austrian immigrant.

23:26Her father, Otto Plath, was a German-American academic, wasn't he? Yeah. He was an expert. He taught German, I think, at Boston University, but also biology. Yeah. And he's massive on entomology, so insects, but also bumblebees are the big thing. He loved bumblebees, as I do, and as Sylvia Plath did. She loved bees. Do you love bumblebees? I do. They make me feel warmath did. She loved bees. Do you love bumblebees? I do. They make me feel warm and sort of not cynical. Yeah. What if they sting you? String. Well, then the cynicism comes back in force. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So it's quite a traditional family upbringing. So, I mean, because obviously so much of this book and her her sort of mystique

24:06is about women trapped by a patriarchal society and otto is a bit of a patriarch isn't he yeah and actually she has a very conflicted and interesting attitude to him so you put me onto this actually tabby the poem daddy it's one of my favorite poems but it's quite a dark it's a very dark poem actually about her attitude to her father she's been a bit criticized for it because she makes a connection between basically totalitarian dictatorship yeah second world war sort of totalitarian dictatorship and patriarchy and fatherhood yeah but i love it i love the meter of it i like the clean prose of it right and you can find online on youtube um a recording of her reading it and it's fabulous no way so anyway he died i mean part of the reason she has a conflict statute towards him

24:49i think is that he died when she was what eight uh he had a foot amputated for diabetes and the operation went wrong he had thought for years he had cancer yeah and he was just too scared to go and check it out turns out it was diabetes and so so Sylvia Plath, the rest of her life, had this kind of weird feeling that he'd almost, he'd subliminally taken his own life. Really? Because he never checked it out. He could have, you know, he could have survived. So in a sense, does she almost blame him? Maybe. You know, for not having had it checked out or whatever. But she's definitely haunted by it, isn't she? So at one point in the book, in the bell jar, Esther, as we're playing Avatar, says, I was only happy for the first nine years of my life

25:33before my father died. And actually, Plath wrote about this herself. She said that there was a division between before Daddy's death and afterwards, and the years before were shut off like a ship in a bottle, beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine white flying myth. Lovely writing. Anyway, she, I suppose to some extent, she feels the loss of her father, but also she feels the pressure of having to live up to her mother's expectations, really. Because they were very poor after Otto died. So money was always an issue and her mother had to go back to work. Yeah. And she feels almost that her mother's love is itself a burden for her. So you found this letter, didn't you, that she wrote to her?

26:15I want to say you found it. I mean, you read about it. Yeah, no, it's original, actually. It's an original discovery. Plath academics all over the country are pulling their hair out. To be clear, Tabby read this in a book. I did read this in a book. She wrote a letter to her brother Warren in 1953. It's a frightening thing that mother would actually kill herself for us if we calmly accepted all that she wanted to do for us. She's an abnormally altruistic person. And I've realised lately, and this is such an interesting line, that we have to fight against her selflessness as we would against deadly disease. And you can sort of see what that means. I think especially for a child, a parent who is almost too loving, who projects so much onto you, that can be a very, very heavy burden to carry.

26:59I think she felt a bit sort of strangulated, A, by the love, but also the fact, I mean, she shared a bedroom with her mother until she was in her late teens, as Esther does in the book. And so that constant presence must have just come to suffocate her, I suppose. Anyway. Yeah. She went to high school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She graduated in 1950. She then got a scholarship to a private women's liberal arts college, Smith, also in Massachusetts. And like Esther in the novel, she's an academic star. She's brilliant. She's actually unusually intelligent. The thing that's interesting, though, is if you read her letters from this time and then you read her journals at this time, there's always a discrepancy in terms of how she's feeling during this period.

27:44Because she often writes to her mother things like, oh, mumsy, I'm so happy here. I could cry. But in her journals, she's often feeling quite low. Maybe that's that thing again about trying to please her mother. I don't know. Trying to please her mother or? Different states of mind. I mean, this sounds like a mad comparison. I'm appalled at myself. But different platforms, you know, you use for different feelings almost. God, you're so like hip. Love that for you. Different platforms. The suffocating, I'm struggling with the suffocating expectations of you mocking everything I say. Of your co-presenter. Yeah, completely. Anyway, she then, esther in the novel she wins this um mademoiselle magazine fiction contest in 1952 which earns her a very coveted internship

28:33in york and she's working at again as a guest editor for a month in june 1953 living at this fancy hotel but she did not enjoy it as she had expected she She found the pressure exhausting, the environment very intense. She thought that she was going there to meet like Dylan Thomas and Truman Capote. And it was far from that. It was, she found it boring, didn't like the materialism. And she actually wrote that she felt that all these young girls were kind of trotted out and sort of objectified wherever they went, sort of how they looked or whatever. And that experience experience that summer experience is exactly what inspired the bell jar and actually so true to life is her portrait of that time in the book that some of the women that she was on the course with in new york later said

29:19that her account of their lives in new york was so accurate that they could never look at each other again. And some even blamed her and the bell jar for breaking up their marriages. I'm looking at you, Doreen. I think that's really harsh. I will say. I think that's harsh. I think the first quarter of the book or so, the stuff in New York, I absolutely loved that. Yeah, I agree. It was so well written. It's funny. And as you say, very very very funny when they have food poisoning yeah no or um or when when they go to a fancy dinner and she she has a finger bowl to clean her hands and she ends up drinking it because she thinks it's a soup yeah anyway or this time is it's the real catalyst for for a shocking downturn a dangerous downturn it's all the

30:03plasmental health because she returns home after this month in New York to the news that she too, well, like her hero, has been rejected from a Harvard writing course, brought on terrible anxiety, insomnia, depression. So that's when she underwent her first extraordinarily traumatic course of electric shock therapy. And it was traumatic because it was badly administered. She wasn't given anesthetic, which means that she was essentially being electrocuted. And she was so frightened of this experience that she might have to relive it. That part of the reason, I think, that maybe she was driven to take her own life, but also because she wrote a letter to a friend just before the real the worst phase of her depression that she would rather die than lose her independence

30:53and her free will and she didn't want her family to remember her as just a mental patient someone kind of turned into a mummy by this electroshock therapy she wanted them to remember her as she was so the electroshock therapy um is as you say the catalyst for her first uh suicide attempt which was in august 1953 plath crawled into this little space underneath the family home and she took sleeping pills and three days passed before she was found and it actually was reported in the local newspapers brilliant college girl disappears and like her heroine like Esther she um is hospitalized she gets psychiatric treatment at McLean hospital and this is funded by her patron you know just as Esther has a patron so Sylvia Plath had a patron

31:38who was called Olive Higgins Prouty but you know the book ends not long after the book cuts off so we don't find out what happens to Esther. But what happened to Sylvia Plath? She recovered. She graduated from Smith, did really well. She got a scholarship to Cambridge University, to Newnham College, a women's college at Cambridge. She went there. At first, she's very excited about going to England. She thinks it'll be a liberation. America is stuffy. England is exciting. But actually, it's a very common experience among Americans who actually come to Oxford and Cambridge. They arrive and they find it very disappointing. They struggle with the weather. They struggle with the sort of unfriendliness of the locals.

32:18Snobby English people. Yeah. So she found it bleak and all of this. She didn't have any heating. Of course, it's 50s Britain. So, you know, it's some way behind america economically yeah she felt like a an imposter like an intellectual interloper i mean obviously a very common experience for people at university she's felt the people found her too american too enthusiastic and i have to say very disappointingly tabby tabby made the point to me that she believes i would be one of the people who would be horrible to Sylvia Plath. I did so see you turning your nose off at some, you know, enthusiastic American in a tutorial. To be fair, having said that, you're very fond of America and Americans.

32:57And you actually once told me that you like their positivity. So I misspoke. I do like their positivity. I do like their positivity. I do like their positivity. Exactly. Thank you, Tabby. Tabby's been very cruel sometimes. God, maybe I need to take a look in the mirror. It's my enthusiasm and idealism that you poke fun at in your cynical way. Oh my God. This is a harrowing come to God moment for me. It is. All right. So anyway, she went through a dark night of the soul a little bit that first winter. You know, God, who am I? I sit in the library tonight. The light's glaring overhead. There's my date this weekend. Someone who believes I'm a human being, not a name merely. And these are the only indications that I'm a whole person, not merely a knot of nerves without identity.

33:40I am lost. Horrible. Again, though, not perhaps immensely unfamiliar among young people no well that's the thing i think relatable far from home you know it is yeah i think a lot of people reading that would say yes i felt like that it's a period in your life where you're desperately trying to search out your identity and kind of think you have to have one rather than being able to kind of have lots sort of thing yeah that's so true when people say who am i they think there's a sentence that actually sums it up or a defined role i couldn't agree with more anyway she you i mean you've described her earlier on and her appetites and stuff she has a real zest for life i think she really does she throws herself into it there's a sort of optimism when she travels around europe

34:21you know that she's sort of soaking up all the experiences. She says it writes at one point that she is solidly, realistically joyous. So it's not all doom and gloom and introspection and misery. You picked out a line here, didn't you, from 1955 about writing to her mother. It's cold biting with blizzard flurries. I bike home from classes and market laden with apples, oranges, nuts and daffodils. I love that. You might almost say it's carefree. but do you think she's manicuring it she's sort of curating it for her mother do you think she absolutely is she's painting a perfect portrait of life even as she's struggling she's a very brave thing to do i think but then it's two weeks after that writing those words

35:02about cycling home with all the stuff that she has the meeting that basically changes her life. At a literary party, she meets a young poet called Ted Hughes. Yeah, so they meet at this Cambridge party. Sylvia Plath had read some of his poems and liked them. So she was kind of curious about him. They're both young, unpublished poets, serious about writing, very ambitious. And when Sylvia Pl described um this meeting in her journal she wrote it was immediate and intense and there's a story that at that party he tried to kiss her and she bit him on the cheek uh in retaliation long and hard in a flirty way or in a i think in a kind of flirty but you know you know, how day, but flirty. Yeah. And he was a famous Zothario.

35:47He was very arrogant. He had a deep voice. And she wrote to her mother that he was used to walking over women like a blast of Jove's lightning and described him as a singer, storyteller, lion and world wanderer with a voice like the thunder of God. Isn't that great? Yeah, it's lovely what have you written in your notes at this point i've written i suspect that at this point ds will make the inevitable inevitable comparison he is very proud of his own voice i mean i am proud of well i'm also proud of i don't think about my voice but i never thought you are i've heard you say before that one of the best you're one of your best features is your voice literally when we're not recording what normally happens is i'm lecturing tabby about my best features is your voice. Literally, when we're not recording, what normally happens is I'm lecturing Tabby

36:26about my best features. Have you noticed that today it's slightly deeper, slightly different tone? Nicole, Nicole, how do I sound? Anyway. I have never, I mean, that Ted Hughes comparison is not one I'd ever anticipated, but I'll take it, actually. But I, you know, I suspect that Sylvia Plath really liked the challenge that Ted Hughes posed. You know, a Lothario, untouchable. In the bell jar, Esther kind of talks about always wanting what she can't have and her fear that the minute she commits to a romantic relationship or something, she'll go off them. She'll start seeing the cracks. And you can see how sultry and confident plath is about winning him she wrote after this as well in her journal kiss me and you'll see how important i am um right and i think

37:11maybe also not to be too pop psychology but maybe she's drawn to his masculinity his height his intelligence you know possibly the fulfillment of a lifetime miss looking for her father something like that this this great big man i mean in daddy for instance yeah that poem which i love and it's actually slightly tragic insight into the future of their relationship she wrote i was 10 when they buried you at 20 i tried to die and get back back back to you i thought even the bones would do i made a model of you a man in black with a mind camp look and a love of the rack and the screw and i said i do i do so in a weird way even even though she's always trying to be free yeah trying to be free from the expectations of others and to find her own

37:56independent voice and stuff yeah there's a bit of her that do you think i mean this is massively pop psychology is there a bit of her that perhaps likes the dominant alpha male side of tattoos? Yeah. And she allowed herself to be extremely codependent with him very quickly. So she wrote, away from you, my own judgments are out of kilter. And also, I think he liked about her the fact that she was simultaneously quite dark and quite kind of anxious, but also fiercely determined, very intelligent, quite catty, quite witty. So you can see it's two forces of nature coming together. And then they're married four months later in June 1956. They moved back to the US for a time in 1957. She resumed therapy working with this woman called Ruth Boucher, who was the doctor who had helped her recover

38:46after her first suicide attempt. Then they settled back in England. And also during this period, you can see how hard she's working. She's got a job in the day and she's feverishly writing poetry at night. Yeah. Then they settled back in England in December 1959. They're living near Primrose Hill and between October 1960 and January 1962, they have two children, a son and a daughter. And Sylvia Plath's first collection of poetry, Colossus, is published in 1960. So it's initially a very literary marriage. Yeah. And it's one of those, I mean, there are some marriages in literary history or cultural history that people have poured over and this is absolutely one of them of course i'm always a little bit wary of this because i think you can never truly know what goes on in somebody else's

39:30marriage i mean people in a marriage themselves you know they only know 50 of it of course because they don't ever they can never access the other person's mind anyway at first i mean this is proper pop psychology now and sort of gossip to an extent which is why i'm sometimes a bit wary about it but anyway at first it seems like they were they were genuine partners do you not think that they were they read each other's drafts they both submitted work to journals together they helped each other they advised each other they're slightly different in temperament ted hughes is more impulsive he's he writes in these sort of manic bursts almost sylvia plath is more uh disciplined she's more methodical she has a schedule and stuff i mean she you know lots of

40:12people listening might say of course she has to because as the white as the mother yeah you know her time is more limited and she can't be self-indulgent and not only that but she's also the secretary to both of them she's submitting all his poems as well as hers. She's typing both of them up. I mean, there's an argument to be made, if someone did make it that I read, that without that administrative role that she took on, he would never have got himself together enough to submit, type up and submit all of his poems. Tabby, so, so often that is the case, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, so often. I don't want to sound like I've become, I mean, I am super woke on this issue so often you read the biographies of of inverted commas great male figures and there's a woman

40:56behind them who's actually doing all the cooking and cleaning all the washing up all the secretarial work basically or cheerleading yeah exactly anyway at first it's it's sort of mutually inspiring and energizing she wrote in her journal ted is the only one who understands my poems you know that they're really both getting something from this but basically what happens at the end of the 1950s is he his style rockets and hers doesn't so she's getting lots of rejections he's becoming you know the great meteor of kind of english poetry also of course at this point she has two very small children anybody listening to this show who has ever had even one small child will know yeah particularly for the mother this absolutely

41:38takes over your life and it's very very difficult to carve out any time away from it and she said that you know when she had just her daughter, Ted would look after her in the mornings and as long as she had her mornings to write, everything else was fine. And then when she had Nicholas, her son, she lost her mornings. So no time. Exactly. And she wrote in her journal, I am a secretary, cook, maid and a poet. So the poet has turned into almost like an afterword. And of course, the other thing that lots of listeners will probably know, there's subsequently been a lot of talk about whether there was domestic abuse in the relationship or whether Hughes was controlling or whether he was violent or whatever.

42:13Which is worth saying, his family have very, very vigorously denied. And it's really hard to know the truth of these things because it's become obscured with so much kind of cultural and gender politics that sometimes the only honest answer is to say we just don't know and we never will. Anyway, she had a miscarriage in 1961. That's obviously incredibly traumatic for her. In her journals, you get the sense of anger and despair and abandonment. Abandonment and it's in 1961 in August that she actually she's been writing The Bell Jar and she to sort of work through I suppose a lot of what she went through in the 1950s and she finishes it in August 1961. Yeah and we'll tie up Plath's story at the end of this episode

42:57after the second half but before then so how did she come to write The Bell Jar how was it received so she'd always intended to write a novel kept stalling she wins this fellowship grant to write the book in 1960 and then she doesn't really do much with it and then in February 1961 she goes to hospital for a brief time and it reminds her of her initial breakdown and hospitalization in 1953 um so she thinks well you know what I'll do I'll write a thinly veiled biography of everything that I've gone through. But it's not, her own life is actually far from the only inspiration. So the second half of the bell jar where Esther is in and out of medical institutions after a suicide attempt, that bears a striking resemblance to the snake pit by the American

43:41author Mary Jane Ward, which is an autobiographical account of her own recovery from mental illness. And it shows harrowingly the terrible conditions inside psychiatric hospitals at that time. And Sylvia Plath had read a review of this. It had gone down an absolute storm and she realized, oh, actually people do want to hear about the truth of mental illness and what goes on and what goes on inside these hospitals. So that was one of many things that spurred her on. And then there were literary inspirations too. So I think sometimes what's lost with the bell jar, because people reduce it to a book about mental health and anxiety and expression, sort of a scream of pain, is what is lost is the literariness of it. So Dostoevsky's big

44:23influence, we're going to be doing White Nights, aren't we, on the show, Dostoevsky's big influence we're going to be doing um white knights aren't we on the show um dostoevsky's short story she's wrote her undergraduate thesis i think on um on doubling in dostoevsky's books um and there's a bit of that in the in in the well jar sort of esther looking in mirrors and things like that virginia wolf of course so mrs dalloway which we talked about one of my favourite books so the idea of a female character whose world is kind of fracturing, whose sense of reality is kind of fracturing, who feels under tremendous intolerable pressure and actually another book, I was thinking about this while I was reading particularly the

45:00New York sections, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye so the cynical slightly flat narration particularly the New York sections, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. So the cynical, slightly flat narration, the deadpan rye humour of Holden Caulfield, of J.D. Salinger's narrator, you can see that Esther's narration is not wholly dissimilar, I would say, and the sort of sense of a teenager disillusioned and caustic about their world. So she wrote it in, what, mid-61? Yeah, the summer of 1961. She wrote it very quickly. So then she finished it and she submitted the manuscript to Harper and Row in the US. It was turned down flat. Their editors declared it disappointing, juvenile and overwrought.

45:42But with her typical doggedness she then submitted it to the british publisher william heineman later faber and faber they agreed to publish it and she was closely involved with editing it working on it right until it was um approved for printing and she chose to publish it under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas to protect her privacy, but also the privacy of all the people that, you know, she had based her characters on very closely. And it was published in January 1963 under the pseudonym. And then she died 28 days later. So she never saw it published under the name Sylvia Plath. And she never saw her wonderful poetry collection Ariel published. Yeah, which was published later wasn't it and at first when the book came out not a great reaction people were

46:30kind of polite about it they didn't hate it but they weren't you know they weren't enormously blown away by it and then what happened it was Ariel that changed it wasn't it so Ariel came out what 1965 two years later and Ariel because because of it, it is so, it feels so like a sort of... Confessional. Yeah, yeah. I'm trying not to use the word raw, but raw is the word. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It's extremely emotionally exposed. Yeah. That is actually, to just say that, I think is doing it a disservice because it's also so tight, you know. She has a wonderful way with imagery and meter that I think is doing it a disservice because it's also so tight you know she has a wonderful way with um imagery and meter I think the tendency when you're talking about authors

47:10like this who write slightly confessional things about the darker things that happen to you suffering and stuff is that you actually miss the craft yeah it goes into it I mean this is the case in our very first episode we did the show Wuthering Heights we talked about that yeah people underestimate Emily Bronte's craftsmanship as a writer. And I think they do that with Sylvia Plath as well. Definitely. Anyway, so the bell jar finally comes out in 66 under her own name, kind of cements her reputation. People are like, oh my God, it's the same woman who wrote Ariel, those poems. They're chuffed with her. And yeah, in the late 60s, she becomes this literary legend, this kind of icon. Of course, easier to do that

47:49when the author is no longer around. You can project all kinds of things onto her. And of course, this is also the moment where the feminist movement is really kind of getting going. So she's a, you know, she becomes a kind of folk heroine for a generation of, I think, young women who are maybe the first women in their family to go to university. They feel possibly they are struggling to find their way in the world in the seventies or something. They're so conscious of the burden that society puts on them. And they look at Sylvia Plath and they say, yeah, she speaks for me. You know, this is brilliant. She gets it. Exactly. So that's when it comes out in the US, isn't it? Seventy-one finally published in the

48:28People have been smuggling copies into the US because it had yet to be published. There's like a black market of Plath books. And her mum was very anti it being published actually in the US because she thought it was ungrateful to the people that Plath was writing about. Well, you can see how if they recognize themselves that closely. It's a bit close to home. Yeah, it could be a bit close to home. Anyway, Tabby, we should absolutely take a break. We've been talking far too long, as is I want. We shall talk about the book itself. We get into the book, about the world it depicts after the break. And we'll also, of course, come to the death and afterlife of Sylvia Plath. So we will see you then. Ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease symptoms don't

49:08pause for the moments that matter. That's why understanding your treatment options matters. Discover what's possible with Trimfiya. Guselcamab. Trimfiya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections, or lower ability to fight them in liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Talk to your doctor and explore what's possible, or call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more about Trampaya. And visit TrampayaRadio.com.

49:50Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Hey, have you always been so big, tall, and handsome? Not always. I was 6'10 once. Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shaq. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com. So good, so good, so good. Stay cozy and look cool with up to 60% off cold weather gear at Nordstrom Rack. Save on cashmere, outerwear, boots, and more from brands like UGG, VINCE,

50:32Cole Haan, and Hunter. Join the UGG, VINCE, COHAN, and HUNTER. Join the Naughty Club for free to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop clearance and new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack. Welcome back, everybody, to the book club. Now, would you like to join a community of brilliant people frustrated by the expectations of modern society like me and Tabby? I bet you would. Well, we have such a thing. It's the people who read our newsletter, Book Club Notes. So this newsletter comes out every Saturday. I know people are probably sick of us talking about this, but we want as many people to read it as possible

51:14because we know there are, we know because we see the data, we know there are loads of people who are listening to this show and not subscribing to the newsletter. It is free. You lose nothing. Subscribe to the newsletter. Genuinely, it's really good. You get stuff from us. You get lots of talking points about the book. Deep dives. Deep d points about the book deep dives deep dives into the book there's also the brilliant thing about this newsletter which has really taken off is that there are so many comments from listeners and readers people saying have you thought about this I think that there's something such and such about a book if you like that you should read this all of this kind of thing

51:50I mean like when we did Rebecca or Lolita we got so many comments and it was great so you're dissolving into american capitalism dominic i know but there's no capitalism because it's free this is the bad thing it's not even like a hard sell because there's no sell it's so free it's like you won't pay anything for it it's insane you literally won't pay anything for it you sign up up at thebookclubhq.com. So people sometimes say, he rushed the description. I didn't hear what it was. You have no excuse this time. It's thebookclubhq.com. Genuinely, it's not a hard sell because it's free. Right. Back to the bell jar. Tabby, talk to me about the bell jar. Okay. So just a quick word on the style of the novel because I think it's one of the best things about it.

52:39It's conversational and personal, but it's always ironic and cynical nothing is left unqualified it's too sharp for any bloated sentimentality so even the most iconic potent image of the book which is the fig tree that we opened with esther herself later satirizes that she says that the image might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach you know which is so funny and it borrows the outline of a buildings roman so this is a coming of age novel provincial girl big city goes to big city disillusionment and return but then it rejects it using the fig tree itself because rather than the typical journey of confusion towards self-knowing and individuation esther is trapped in this perpetual cycle of disassociation and confusion

53:19and she rejects the idea of a single identity a single moment of knowing of self-understanding right because in a coming of age novel you move through different stages and you become yourself little women for instance yeah exactly little women yeah you overcome stages and you become yourself. Little women, for instance. Yeah, exactly. Little women. Yeah, you overcome challenges and you reach an end point. And you know yourself at the end. Yes, exactly. This is not the case with this book. So actually, this book ends at a moment of almost uncertainty as she's walking into the meeting. Well, we'll discuss this at the end because I think it's so strong. Okay. Yeah. I don't want to jump ahead. So if we just talk about the main characters,

53:52so this is silvia plath's avatar who is esther greenwood in the film you're very excited about this film tabby because billy eilish is yeah you're big i just think um i'm not a massive billy eilish fan truth be told but i think i do think it makes sense as a casting decision you know billy eilish very much plays into the the inner angst version of things she kind of looks like how i imagine has she ever done any acting before though uh not as far as i'm aware big test big test if you set the bar quite high by appearing on the book i think that's your big test so can billy eilish live up to your example and that's what the world will be waiting for and wondering yeah so um esther i think for me the brilliant thing about esther is you've already That's what the world will be waiting for and wondering. Yeah. So, Esther.

54:34I think for me, the brilliant thing about Esther is you've already hit the nail on the head. She's not one thing. She's complicated. She is different things to different people. Unlikable sometimes, which I think is good. As you say, she can be sentimental. She can be cynical. She can be a typical teenager at times or a typical young woman. But then there's also moments where she resists that and she kicks against it, as we all do. You mentioned Sylvia Plath and her extraordinary sandwiches. One of the things that's really funny about Esther, particularly in the first part of the book, is when she's talking about food. Oddly intense relationship with food. Yeah. She eats eats a whole lobster doesn't she at her lunch for a

55:17magazine a decorous lady's lunch yeah she's there's like crab meat avocado i mean of course some of this ends very badly um when they all get well i love this so they all get this food poisoning don't they and this is a really really well written almost slightly sort of dreamlike chapter yeah they all get this they've been eating crab meat salad the interns and it's funny and it's clever because you know this is a consumerist fantasy this is a 1950s magazine fantasy of being an intern for a magazine everybody's very glossy everybody's well turned out it's in new york it's brilliant you're eating this fancy food and then you spend the evening all the girls yeah who are such sort of sex objects

56:00and stuff and so glamorous and desirable beautifully turned out yeah they basically all spend the evening being sick yeah um esther says she feels purged afterwards, purged and holy. Perhaps an indication there of some of her anxieties, I guess, and some of her issues. Because this is sort of self-loathing about having gone in for this world, I think. And actually, when she does come home and when she succumbs to her depression, when her depression overtakes her, she doesn't want to eat, does she? No. Which is a kind of sign that things are wrong um and esther the the thing about her is everybody thinks she's brilliant so she's been obviously very smart at school she has a boyfriend you know

56:45she has friends she's everything she's meant to be as a girl at her stage of life and therefore the expectation is you have everything required of you to be content and there's nothing worse than to be expected to be happy yeah inexplicably not and part of it is an unhappiness that she carries within her because of the death of her father i mean that definitely comes through doesn't it and that reflects sylvia platt's own life when we talked about the poem daddy part of it is that that it's in her yeah part of it is also a very you said relatable a very relatable thing which is that she has reached you know she's reached this point where she's at university age and whatnot but she doesn't know what she wants to do yeah she doesn't know which path to choose in life

57:30you know she she wants to always be allowed to be herself and do what she wants to do. But she's also desperate to fit in and meet expectations. She also fears that she'll lose control and just be propelled. She'll lose her free will and she'll just be propelled into a particular course that she doesn't really want. She'll be forced to take a fig. So she says, I wasn't steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped. So, you know, this brings us back to the opening reading she says you know with so many futures open to me if i choose one i will lose all the rest forevermore yeah close up all the others which is a frightening thing for a bright intelligent ambitious young woman and because of this because of her inability to choose and decide what or who

58:14she wants to be she spends a lot of them the novel kind of trying on different identities playing with her identity forging alternative realities so there's a point in the novel where um she pretends to be called ellie higginbottom of chicago and then she's always imagining what it would be like to be the other girls doing the magazine internship with her. So Doreen, Betsy. And she always tells people one thing because she wants to give a certain impression, but she knows full well in the back of her mind, she says it quite openly. I know I'll never do that. So for instance, she keeps telling everyone because she thinks it sounds impressive that she wants to learn German but she knows she never will or she sits down to

58:58write a book at one point there's actually a private joke here from Sylvia Plath because Esther says my heroine would be myself only in disguise a six-lettered name as Esther is to Plath but she never manages to write a word yeah um and i'm sure lots of people do that at that age you know you say well i mean obviously i'm going to achieve this and obviously you know i'm gonna you know learn greek or whatever it is and actually maybe you know because even though you're at that time of life where you feel that everything is possible you still know deep down it's impossible yeah i think there's a sense isn't there when you're that age that the world is open to you, but you are overwhelmed by the possible choice.

59:36Paralyzed. You absolutely, I mean, you're dead right. You worry that you choose one thing and it closes off all the other options. So you are frozen. But also a sense that, you know, things that, an anxiety that things are slipping away from you, that somebody else, everybody else has chosen and you haven't. And the world is moving on and you're going to be left behind and you've got nowhere to go. I think a wonderful passage actually is where this woman, JC, she's the magazine editor, I think. She asks Esther, what do you want to do? And Esther says, I don't really know. I felt deep shock hearing myself say that because the minute I said it, I knew it was true. And she says, she has a lovely line, she says, it feels like the knowledge that she doesn't know what to do feels

1:00:17like there's been a bloke hanging around your door all this time and you sort of knew deep down he was your real father but you didn't want to admit it again again the stuff about the father about who your father is but you know so kind of dislocated does she feel, so untethered, that she actually, she's actually physically transformed. Like at one point, a very heartbreaking moment after she's attempted to commit suicide, she's given a mirror and she holds it up. And the way that it's written, it's written as though she's describing a stranger. She has no idea that it's her. She doesn't recognize herself. You know, her head's been shaved. She, you know, she says one side of the person's face was purple and bulged out in a shapeless way.

1:01:01The person's mouth was pale brown with a rose colored sore at either corner. You know? Yeah. Tragically alienated from herself and all of this begins when she finds herself untethered in new york after as we had described all these years of hard work knowing where she stood knowing how she knowing how she fitted in knowing what she had to achieve good grades basically and then discovering that all of that is totally irrelevant and pointless in the real world. Yeah, exactly. So she's basically, she's done fantastically well. And she just is frozen and crushed almost by the realization that nothing that she has done now really matters. That it was all, you know, it was all, it wasn't empty. That's not right.

1:01:52But it hasn't set her up neatly for this sort of easy career. So there's a moment when the interns are all told, please pose for a picture with a prop. And the prop will reflect your future aspirations. But isn't that so reductive, you know? Sum up your whole future with one object. Some people, did you know people at university and stuff who knew what they wanted to do who were like completely single-minded some but a lot of people changed that's the thing and i think esther knows that yeah but i mean i didn't know really what i wanted to do so i would have probably i mean god i'm mad i mean how depressing if there was some photo of me all those years training to be a ballet dancer for naught.

1:02:36I know, it's such, it's a timeless tale, Dominic, and I feel for you. What would you be posing with, Tabby? I don't know, like a mallet. What were you hoping to be? Someone who tore down their fellow presenters in years to come. Yeah, right, thanks. Yeah, stiletto. But anyway, she says, the only thing I was ever good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end. I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted with Wall Street in a business suit. In days of glory, shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantle with a date engraved on it like the date date on a tombstone it's very good writing you like at this point you

1:03:19claim this is very relatable and this is how you well i think it's relatable so did you regard yourself you regarded yourself as a champion racehorse no definitely not because i i wasn't particularly high achieving when i was in the educational system. But I definitely remember. You know, you've been in institutions for so long. You know, like what you need to do to meet the quota. Yeah. And then I remember coming out. I mean, it was also kind of COVID. And being like at home a lot. With totally clueless as to what I really wanted to do. And trying to be realistic about the fact that what I really liked doing was like reading books and writing essays and stuff like that. And that that was going to serve me not one iota in the real world.

1:04:00You were wrong. You were wrong, Tabby. I actually was wrong. Yeah, I actually was wrong. But I mean, what I went through was nothing on what I... was nothing in comparison to what Esther's faced with. Because she's in 1950s America, which is a very fixed patriarchy, where women have expectations of them. They have roles that they're meant to step into. It doesn't matter if they've had fantastic educations and degrees and they're really bright. They've got to be housewives, domestic. And these are always big themes in Plath's poetry, you know, the struggle between these two sides of life, the traditional and the more subversive. If I can jump in for a second about the historical context in case listeners are interested in

1:04:45me, if you're not interested, you know, do something else in the next moment. But actually, the reason that this is the case is because the two world wars had been so dislocating for you know gender relations in america that after men return i mean this is the truth this is the case in other western countries as well when men return 1945 and this is sort of getting back to normal i think there's a general sense, you know, right, let's get, you know, things have been very chaotic and women have been going into factories and, you know, men have been unmanned and all of this kind of thing. So let's really get back to a conservative, settled, fixed family unit, nuclear family kind of world. And so actually in some ways, the 1950s are more conformist

1:05:33than the decades that went before them it's like your reactionary right aren't you yeah exactly i mean for instance i found i was looking through um the ads from the periods i mean you spoke about mad men and for instance like a classic was this tomato ketchup bottle and the tagline is you mean a woman can open it without a knife blade a bottle opener or even a husband and that's like that's classic with a very skinny waisted woman kind of smiling at the camera like yeah exactly so there's the very famous passage isn't there and there's somebody about to get married tabby this must this must haunt you this must haunt you the blue jobs and the pink jobs um yeah because i mean esther dreads uh domestic drudgery and so

1:06:17she meets this young man and she imagines what it would mean to marry him let's hope i'm not looking into a looking glass um it would mean getting up at seven and cooking him eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed and then when he came home after a lively fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates so I fell into bed utterly exhausted oh my word well thank goodness what a bleak prospect isn't it thank goodness you're the breadwinner in your household exactly thank goodness I'm marrying an aspiring writer and that to me actually when I read that passage instantaneously i was like that is that is my vision of 1950s america you know you've never

1:06:57seen pleasantville but in the first half of the movie before it um it goes from black and white into color that is the the mother's daily routine i mean that's samantha's daily routine and bewitched right and she has this fear with this buddy willard. Buddy Willard. Who's going to be a doctor. And she thinks it will be a dreary and wasted life for a girl with 15 years of straight A's. And she looks at Buddy Willard's mother, doesn't she? And she says basically what she does is cook and clean and wash from morning till night. And I do not want that. Yeah. And his mother had a promising career as a teacher. And then now look at her and she's basically a full-time housewife and she's become very, very conservative.

1:07:41She's very disapproving of women following other paths. So because of all this, Esther's very, feels imprisoned, you know? Yeah. She fears losing herself. And yet, as we said, she's still a teenager seeking to fit in preoccupied with fitting in and so one of her main a big obsession of hers in the novel is losing her virginity because she feels burdened by it she sees sex all around her she doesn't want to be left out but she's terrified of falling pregnant because she thinks the motherhood will diminish her and rob her of her aspirations you know and yet she wants to fit in and and so she she says i also remembered bonnie willard saying in a sinister knowing way that after i had children i would feel differently i wouldn't want to write poems anymore

1:08:24so yeah exactly again she gives up her true dream in order to become a mother she she worries that it will be just an image she says i worry that if I had kids and I married I would be going around numb as a slave in some private totalitarian state. She loves the fascistic language. Yeah, she does. But I mean she's writing the 1950s. The fascistic language, the sort of also the totalitarian, you know this is the age of McCarthyism as we said so it's in the air, exactly. She's cross about, I mean she's very clear eyed clear sighted about the hypocrisy of what's fine for a man is not fine for a woman. So Buddy's mother expects that Esther will stay pure before her marriage but Buddy because he's a young

1:09:08man can sow his wild oats all that sort of thing. Also she's very clear sighted about the different opportunities for men and women. So a wonderful line, a man is an arrow into the future, and a woman is the place that the arrow shoots off from. I mean, that goes back to the thing we were saying about how, for so many writers of this period, the post-war period, their lives are facilitated by their wife in the background doing all the work for them so that they can sit around typing it's like a vision of your life i know i wish i could say i could relate but actually i feel like i feel like i feel like i get the the the like proper nice treatment you reckon yeah my fiance is very domestic so i'm quite lucky in that way well tabby

1:09:54is having a wonderful time like you know talking to a favorite person on the podcast behind in the background yeah no one else can see this but i know it's happening yeah there's a bloke there's a really depressed looking bloke like doing all the washing off and dealing with the maggots in the background he gets such a hard time he gets a hard time oh washing off and dealing with the maggots in the background. Shame, he gets such a hard time. He gets a hard time. Oh, yeah, exactly. Well, the maggots that he brought into the picture. I'm just saying, he gets such a hard time on air, at the live shows, but actually, yeah, he's the genius behind the scenes. So just on Esther, one last point about Esther Tabby.

1:10:24Do you see her as a feminist? Is she a standard bearer for feminism? I'm not sure she really is. She doesn't have any real sense of that, does she? No, I think, again, that would be flattening. It would be a bit reductive. Because she's not in any way a parent. Because, again, she's multidimensional. She's not just one thing. There's a lot about her that's unlikable. She sees herself slightly above all the other girls who she homogenizes, you know, in quite a sexist way, possibly. She sort of fetishizes her difference she's proud of the fact that she's disgusted by and sees through the things that they seem to idolize she and the bell jar have actually um come under fire for moments of quite racist language and stereotypes

1:11:07for this for instance there's a moment when esther is is horrible and so rude to this man that's serving them in her first asylum that she's at. She's very unkind to this character, Joan, who joins Esther in her final mental institution. And Joan kind of makes the possibly lesbianic move on her. And Esther's just like, I don't like you. She's catty. Yeah, but the thing is, it's mad to criticise either Esther or the book for that, I think. Because basically, Esther is a complicated, real, in inverted commas, real person who's not a saint. Her characterization is so much richer for it. Because what Sylvia Plath isn't allowing us to do is angelicize mental illness and depression or show it as something

1:11:53romantic and painless and like beautiful you know like uh lizzie siddle or something in um the pre-raphaelite paintings pale and one and tragic she's showing it's you know rooted in a real human being who's flawed and it's physically in many ways repulsive and unglamorous. Yeah. And I think that's important. I agree with you completely. I would say it doesn't glamorise depression. It doesn't glamorise being institutionalised or any of these kind of things. It makes it horrific, like when she looks at herself in the mirror and is all the better for it, actually. I mean, Esther doesn't want to be depressed. No, she's desperate to be free. And actually, it would be doing so many people that had suffered similar things such a disservice if she did.

1:12:37Because it would glamorize what is a truly horrible, grotesque, destructive experience. Yeah, well the sense of hopelessness, the sense of despair, the sense of being enclosed. And that takes us obviously to the image of the bell jar, doesn't it? To the central image, yeah. Yeah, so the bell bell jar there are lots of images of imprisonment in the book it's actually there was one i i was reading rereading it this morning the bit when you know she's told she hasn't got on the writing course which is the bit that really pushes her down down down kind of um underwater as it were um she says then when she finds out she doesn't get the writing course that the car roof closed over my head like the roof of a prison van and she looks at the

1:13:19houses the white clapboard houses with the interstices of well-groomed green one bar after another in a large but escape proof cage in the sense of being hemmed in but the thing that really captures this is obviously the image of the jarmed in but the thing that really captures this is obviously the image of the jar so it's transparent everyone can see you everyone's looking at you you know the glass jar that descends over you it blocks out the air it's like a vacuum so you can't breathe yeah you can't breathe exactly you can see the world out too but you can't engage in it you're cut off yeah which is obviously how lots of people feel when they're depressed they can't communicate and um but also it's this sort of sense of everything

1:13:58is distorted and you cannot escape it's you're you're under the bell jar wherever you go whatever you do um so the it's almost dreamlike i suppose to some extent isn't it? Yeah a dreadful waking dream so she says to the person in the bell jar Blanken stopped as a dead baby the world itself is a bad dream wherever I sat on the deck of the ship or a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar stewing in my own sour air and I think some of the most affecting parts of this book are those middle sections when she is truly under the jar and because we're always inside her head we live it alongside her and it's important to say that it's not dramatic you don't get much of a sense of kind of emotional

1:14:47escalation it's awfully apathetic she is awfully apathetic and numb and that's what's so dreadful is it's not the deep purples or the deep blues of like agony or loss or grief or sadness it's the continuous gray of depression it's something different she says i saw the days of the year stretching ahead like a series of bright white boxes and separating one box from another was sleep like a black shade only for me the long perspective of shades a set of one blocks from the next had suddenly snapped up and i could see day after day after day glaring ahead of me like a white broad infinitely desolate avenue yeah it's um it's very well done that image i think and that sort of sense of the days she keeps keeps a tally of them, doesn't she?

1:15:35Because she basically stops washing her hair. She stops washing her clothes. She stops eating and sleeping. And she's sort of, I haven't washed my hair for three weeks. I haven't slept for seven nights, 14 nights. I haven't slept for 21 nights. Because what's the point? Yeah, exactly. But, well, in terms of the help that she gets her mother doesn't really understand her and doesn't quite approve of her does she i mean her mother is just bewildered by it um the first doctor dr gordon i mean he gives her the first course of electroconvulsive therapy and this is a um terrible turning point a terrible turning point. So she shuts her eyes. She says there was a brief silence like an indrawn breath.

1:16:15And something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Wee. It shrilled through an air crackling with blue light. And with each flash a great jolt drubbed me until I thought my bones would break. And the saps fly out of me like a split plant. And then, it's like it's a punishment it's a torture i wondered what terrible thing it was that i had done which is so sad because she's done nothing you know it's making me feel like her illness is something she used to be feel guilty for it's tragic on the electroconvulsive therapy um people who knew silver plath said you know that's she felt that that had been one of the great traumatic moments of her life that first course of ect ted hughes you know when he was talking about the bell jar said that's what

1:17:06really lay behind it that experience yeah which left a scar that never really healed yeah and you can sense that in that passage can't you it's horribly visceral god but this experience and i suppose the culmination of her um of her sense of dislocation her depression culminates in esther contemplating various means of killing herself she finds that she's unable to hurt herself physically so like sylvia plath she crawls into a hole in her mother's basement and overdoses on sleeping pills and it's the way herself she finds that she's unable to hurt herself physically so like Sylvia Plath she crawls into a hole in her mother's basement and overdoses on sleeping pills and it's the way that the scene plays out that I was struck by because it's calm it's a matter of fact everything she

1:17:42does and the build-up to it is meticulously performed she puts things back exactly where she took them from so while she's about to enact a shocking act of self-destruction, the language that Plath uses is mundane, unchanged. So it's as though life is droning on no matter what Esther does, no matter that she's about to leave. That's the chilling thing. It's the flatness, the hollowness of the writing there. The very flat, unsentimental, almost unemotional way that she writes about it. That's what makes it so powerful i think as a scene yeah but then she finds the darkness of the cellar that she calls into comforting like velvet so it's almost as though she's about to find relief she's about to go to bed

1:18:24then she wakes up in hospital to darkness because she thinks she's blind but she's got bandages wrapped around her head so it's as though she's gone from darkness back into darkness. The bell jar is still above her. There's no, you know, moment of enlightenment, relief, great healing. And then this leads us into the final section of the book, which mainly takes place in mental institutions. Exactly. So psychiatric hospitals. So this, you know, it's full of you'd have to i mean you can sense this is written by somebody who's been in this world the world of the wards of the treatments of the nurses and so on um you know this is a uh a high point of institutionalization in america a couple of decades later it would be reversed people they would try to not to have people in

1:19:14institutions but in the 50s and 60s these places are kind of creaking under the weight of people who are being institutionalized and yet those in society it was not embraced was it you were kind of ostracized if it was revealed that you'd been in a mental institution or something like that of course yeah of course. Dr. Nolan says to her at one point, people will shy away from you. They will treat you gingerly or even avoid you like a leper with a warning bell. And she says she knows that her mother is ashamed, is so ashamed. A daughter in an asylum. I had done that to her. So she feels guilty, which is, of course, awful. I know. But it's you know i know but it's often how people do feel in that in that um in that position so she has the new doctor dr

1:20:00nolan who is much kinder and um actually this is interesting dr nolan says you won't ever have to have that again that kind of treatment but then actually dr nolan does give her the treatment again which esther is very at first horrified feels betrayed, feels she's been lied to. This institution that she's at is actually very comfortable. She likes the routines. She likes the food. So she's lulled into, you know, she's on the road to recovery, I guess. And then, as you say, she feels so betrayed when this is raised to her again as a treatment. But this, so the book is not totally damning about the treatment no because actually the treatment in the second place the treatment by dr nolan is clearly done

1:20:38with a sense of care and compassion yeah in a way that the previous treatment wasn't don't you think and actually silver path this is not a book that is basically there are there's a whole load of books like one flow of the cougar's nest or something yeah which are attacking instant men you know mental health institutions, yeah. Exactly. This is not one of them, I wouldn't have said. Actually, the portrait is more nuanced. No, it's a nice hospital that she's at. The patients are allowed certain freedoms. As you say, Dr. Nolan is a really benevolent character. She actively helps Esther to recover and to understand her condition because she is a woman and she understands it from a woman's perspective. A real turning point in Esther's recovery is when Dr.

1:21:17Nolan prescribed her contraception, which was very unusual at the time still, because she realizes that Esther is terrified of motherhood, but wants to lose her virginity and fit in. And Dr. Nolan is based on Ruth Boucher, who was Plath's therapist who helped her. And Nolan does help Esther regain clarity. She does help Esther to escape the bell jar a little. And re-enter the world as Esther does. She goes back to school, like to college. She loses her virginity. But it's actually not a straightforward ending by any means it's brilliantly unsatisfactory it's ambiguous it's sort of unfinished because yes the bell jar has been raised but it still hangs suspended and a few feet above my head she says with the question

1:22:06left hanging with it how did i know that someday at college in europe somewhere anywhere the bell jar with its stifling distortions wouldn't descend again? And that's a painfully apt portrait, I think, of depression because it is that black dog that always comes out. It can never truly be mastered or got rid of. But yeah, it can be survived and people can thrive afterwards. But it's not, it would be so belittling to say, oh, there are just these happy endings. And like any other illness, you can just turn a new leaf and you're absolutely fine for the rest of your life. Yeah, agreed. And for instance, there's this terrible, an unpleasant reminder, I suppose, of that is that Joan, this girl that Esther is at this institution with, we find out later that she has actually taken her own life.

1:22:50So it's the nasty warning of what could be. It's not totally dark, is it? Because she does she has a second birth she still is she still exists she says i am i am i am um there's the threat of the belgium but there's also the possibility of a long bright life yeah do you know this is i mean this is so interesting isn't it because actually the book ends on an on an ambiguous note but one that i think leads us to be more optimistic than yes i i i thought it was optimistic really you've quite i think you're dead right that a couple of pages earlier she says the bell jar could descend again at any moment so we don't we're not you know it's not like happily ever after but it ends with dr nerlin coming to her

1:23:33and touching her on the shoulder it's a lovely little sort of moments of compassion and fellowship and then basically leading her in to see all the people in this sort of meeting who are going to the doctors are basically going to discuss about you know is she is she ready to to go is she ready to be sort of let out as it were um is she going to and she describes it as being reborn she says it ought to be a ritual for being born twice yeah and if you'd read this not knowing about the author you would say do you know what it was actually a reasonably happy ending yeah i think you would you know maybe they've put her on the road to recovery you know there'll be ups and downs but, but it could have been a lot worse.

1:24:16Of course, we read this knowing that just a month after the book was published, Sylvia Plath did take her own life. And it's impossible now to read it without... I mean, it would be... You almost wish you could read it without that knowledge, don't you? Yeah, I think that's true. But that knowledge really overshadows the ending of the book, I think, in a way that turns this into this sort of a tragic story rather than one with elements of hope, which actually takes us to what happened to Sylvia Plath, Tabby. Yeah, so the end, the last portion of her life. Yeah. After completing the bell jar in 1961, she and Ted Hughes moved to Devon. And before leaving London, they let out their flat to the Canadian poet David Wevel

1:25:02and his wife, Asya. The couples become friends. Then Sylvia Plath discovers that Ted Hughes is having an affair with Asya. And she is devastated. I mean, she is so devastated, as you would be. And then in June 1962, she drives her car off the side of a road after hearing the news. And it's debated now whether or not this was a suicide attempt or rather maybe just like a destructive urge, a destructive release. So she and Ted initially tried to repair the relationship, they ended up separating for good in october 1962 there were kind of there was semi there was talk of maybe resurrecting things um for the last portion of her life but never came to anything she missed him though but that said his departure does inspire the most productive period of her life this is when she composes most

1:25:53of the poems that make up the legendary um collection which i love ariel so you know from that terrible despair came a beautiful thing she returned to london in december 1962 actually full of optimism and she's living alone with her two children and the circumstances are just it couldn't really be worse this is one of the coldest winters ever known in the UK it's the big freeze winter of 62 to 63 yeah pipes freezing everything is like Britain's literature to stand still yeah her water wasn't running she had a bathtub full of dirty water her children keep getting sick by the way they're nine months and two years old and she's alone with them also trying to work she keeps getting ill as a single mother i mean that is a that is an

1:26:43overwhelming that's that that would be terrible how could anyone keep their head above the parapet with all of that going on and she has has no telephones. She's very isolated. She is really missing Ted Hughes. And so her depression and insomnia unsurprisingly return in force. She described it as owl's talons clenching my heart. She told her doctor that this had been going on for about six to seven months. And he prescribed her these pills, which Ted Hughes later said he thought escalated her mental deterioration because they were untested on her this is unconfirmed her doctor tried to have her admitted to a hospital she was frightened of this because of her earlier experiences um so instead he decided to send a

1:27:24nurse to help her with the children um she's only 30 at this time yeah and the nurse is due to arrive one morning the 11th of February 1963 tries to get into the flat can't get into the flat and basically just gets into the flat finally and they discover that Sylvia Plath has taken her own life and she's died of carbon monoxide poisoning and in very you know characteristic fashion she'd prepared for this meticulously she had sealed off the kitchen from the rest of their house the rest of the flat uh with tape and whatnot and cloth said that the children would be unharmed would be unharmed and she'd left food out for the children and whatnot she'd opened the windows in their bedroom she'd left them a little note saying call the doctor she won't call the

1:28:08doctor please and i don't know why there's something about that like decorous use of please even at the very end yeah it's it's really it's really really sad um her friend julian becker uh wrote in her biography of plath that a police officer who worked for the coroner's office said there was no question whatsoever that she had this was not a cry for help this was a um she'd meant to die yeah she meant she knew exactly what she was doing she was determined to go through with it um the gravestone in which both her name and the name and ted hughes's surname are inscribed which is very controversial uh the gravestone has an inscription chosen by ted hughes even amidst fierce flames the golden locust lotus can

1:28:53be planted and i mean the gravestone itself is like they've been the focus of kind of vandalism and yeah you know people trying to scratch his the word hughes off yeah off the tombstone and there was a huge cottage industry basically of people either saying ted hughes is a monster and it's all his fault she wouldn't have died if it hadn't been for him kind of thing or people including it has to be said their daughter yeah frida yeah frida who say he has been turned into a stage villain by the i mean ted hughes himself effectively said by the sylvia plath industry has cast me as this villain and there's nothing i can ever do that will or say that will make them look on me differently or to see that it was more complicated or whatever.

1:29:39To be completely honest, it's one of those things that I look at and I think I could probably spend 10 years reading about this and I still would be none the wiser because as we said before, I don't believe that you can ever really know what happens in somebody else's relationship. And, you know, being judgmental about it so long after the fact doesn't really seem to me a terribly productive thing to do. Yeah. And also, you know, he's been widely criticized as the executor of her estate because he destroyed some of her journals. He said to protect his children. He also reordered Ariel. It was left by her bedside table. And she wanted it to start with the word love and end with the word hope.

1:30:15And he put a slightly darker spin on it. Whatever it may be. I think you're right. I read so much about this. You can read and read and read. It's difficult to make a judgment. There's so much that's unknown. But also, I think we're missing the point as well. Of course, she was a remarkable person with an interesting life. But it's her writing that you know really lives on and thanks to the bell jar and ariel she has been turned into this literary legend she means a lot to many people it's a feminist martyr you know someone that examined and criticized gender expectations she's been viewed as an artist who was driven to take her own life by an oppressive husband and a pre-feminist world she's seen as a tragic heroine this troubled genius i think there's probably truth in all

1:31:01of those portraits but i also feel like that's probably a little bit reductive i i get i feel like her death the circumstances of her death her, her marriage have been sensationalized to the point that I think they've come to overshadow the kind of gregariousness of her character, her wit, how remarkably intelligent she was. And above all, you know, she is someone that spoke openly and honestly and wittily about depression. But above all, I think she was an excellent, brilliant writer. It was extremely hardworking and a superb poet. And that's that's I mean, we're doing this episode to talk about her work, really more than her. Yeah, agreed. Agreed completely. And I will say on the book, I actually found the book really enjoyable.

1:31:47It is not I did not find it a miserable. I didn't actually find it miserable and angst ridden and i didn't find it hard work i was as i said i was reading on holiday and i looked forward to when i would get back into it because it was you say it was written with a kind of dry humor often and a beautiful um use of language very it's not indulgent. Quite neat kind of controlled portraits of people. It's neat. Yeah. But I thought I liked it a lot more than I thought I would. So Tabby, what are we marking this? What's our scale? So I think we'd be doing ourselves and Sylvia Plath a disservice if we didn't rate it in her beloved deluxe peanut butter sandwiches spiced with onion. Oh, my word. That's the worst thing you've said.

1:32:37Peanut butter bacon sandwiches spiced with onion. Yeah, and mayonnaise. So I am going to give it eight. Nice. Now, I'm not being, I'm taking two marks off. People say, why didn't you give it 10? I'm not giving it 10 because I have no problem with the book at all. I mean, there's nothing I would criticize. It didn't actually haunt me. It didn't linger in my head as much as I thought it perhaps would. I think that's partly because the style is quite laconic. Yeah. And it's not laconic yeah and it's not because precisely because it's not self-indulgent actually um because it's quite controlled and i perhaps didn't feel a sense of the uh the the rage the sheer anguish that i might have done however that i mean i'm not it would be bonkers for me to criticize the book for that

1:33:33because obviously it's a classic for a reason. It means a lot to a lot of people. And I think it is actually, do you know what, Tubby? It's exactly the kind of book that I would never have read if I hadn't done this show. And I'm really glad that I did. Yeah, you owe me so much. Yeah, I recommend it to the listeners. What about you? I think I'm going to give it nine because I think it's always important to reward books on the basis of just how much you enjoyed reading them and as you say it's not all doom and gloom and i really enjoyed reading it like i found it and lovely easy not lovely maybe but certainly that an easy read you wanted to pick it up and get back into it you know but i'm just

1:34:08going to dock one mark maybe because as you say because it is so tight and sharply written and controlled uh you almost would have needed kind of one moment of emotional explosion or something to contrast that um but it's really really great book really enjoyable read very well written so there we go okay well um so what do we have coming up? A reminder, as if I didn't hector the listeners enough that they should sign up for that newsletter at bookclubhq.com. Book Club Notes, sign up at bookclubhq.com. Hugely exciting. This also shambles the way we actually do these. Calls to action, as they are technically known. CTAs. So what do we have coming up? We have White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

1:34:53The Shining by Stephen King Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Money by Martin Amis So some brilliant, brilliant books there Big line up Right, thank you very much Tabby I'm off to eat a deluxe peanut butter sandwich spiced with onion and bacon. See you next time. I feared you would say that. I'm hoping you weren't going to go there, but you did. If you're building AI agents, you should check out Strands Agents. It's an open source SDK for Python and TypeScript. The idea is simple. Give a model some tools, let it decide what to call and when, and loop until it's done. No chain configs, no graph orchestration, and works with any model provider. It's also open source and built and tested for production agents.

1:35:52Get started at strandsagents. Right. It's perfect for camping trips. Dance for it, feeble mortal! Sorry, is he talking to me or... Dance! Ha ha ha ha ha! From our tradition to yours, Stonefire. Together, we naan. Clothes shopping really isn't my thing. But I still want to look sharp and feel confident That's why I use stitch fix the og personal styling service No more scrolling through websites or wasting my day at the store My stylist sends pieces picked just for me straight to my door free shipping free returns No subscription required get started today at stitch fix calm. That's stitch fix calm