The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath’s fictionalized autobiography about descending into madness (depression). The first time I read it, though I’d dealt with depression a few times already, I still didn’t ‘get’ it. This time around I absolutely got it, for better or worse. The quotes I’m putting up are the ones that most accurately capture the experience of depression, from my point of view.

Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react. I felt very still and very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.

I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more.

I felt very low. I had been unmasked only that morning by Jay Cee herself, and I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn’t hide the truth much longer.

I thought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I was only purely happy until I was nine years old.

For me it was eight.

I started adding up all the things I couldn’t do.

Andrew Solomon talks about this in Noonday Demon-about how one begins to feel crushed by all the things one cannot do-even things one doesn’t want to do, but will never be able to.