Finished The Bell Jar. It's not quite the misery porn I thought I was going to get from woman-in-1950s-asylum. Sylvia gets thrown into the loony bin about 100 pages before the finish line, and before that there's this whole other half to the novel that's dark and depressing but also kinda funny and whimsical. But it's all leading to the loony bin, and of course we know how that worked out for her, so there's that particular cloud hanging over the whole thing. It's honestly kinda fascinating to follow the roadmap of the character's suicidal ideation knowing you're probably looking at Sylvia's actual train of thought. And there's a particularly nasty character named Buddy Willard who I've decided is basically just Ted Hughes. Buddy's Esther's on-and-off thing who used to date this other frenemy of Esther's who offs herself after Esther tries to do the same. In a moment of self-pity Buddy asks Esther if she thinks he's the one driving women into suicide... which is probably how it went between Ted and Sylvia. A few years later, his second wife killer herself (and her daughter). And then Sylvia's kid did the same. Stay far and away from Ted!