In my continuing effort to read the classics, I decided to listen to The Bell Jar, as read by Maggie Gyllenhaal, on a recent 7 hour solo car trip. Friends warned me against it. “You’ll be so depressed! That sounds awful!” they all chimed.
Gyllenhaal was a great reader, and I was drawn into the story. But I wasn’t depressed at all. The Bell Jar is not exactly chick lit (although, there are some similarities—man troubles, friends as your biggest comfort, a career woman new to the city!) but I didn’t find it as gloomy and doomy as I’d expected. Mainly, I think that’s because I’d read lots of the “young girls with mental illness” books when I was a teen myself. Lisa, Bright and Dark. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and Sybil. Plus, I’d read a lot of the ones from more recent years, such as those by Sonya Sones and Ellen Hopkins.
Of course, without The Bell Jar, these books likely wouldn’t exist. But that didn’t change the fact that for me, The Bell Jar wasn’t the first in the canon, it was about the 50th.
This is so important to keep in mind when you work with young people. We need to remember that for teens, this is their first vampire book, strong female fantasy, chick lit. Especially for those of us who read widely, it is so easy to become jaded when you read yet another of a certain genre.