(But it still took me months to crack open the spine.)

Unlike people, books/characters/authors come into your life for a reason, season AND a lifetime. Why Sylvia and her Esther Greenwood would decide to show up on my doorstep now (as opposed to sooner and/or later) is interesting to me.

Not to get all eerily emo on you, but I'm going to get pretty honest right now… Ahem.  There have been several moments when I have felt the very emotions that poor Esther and Sylvia have felt…
The. (very) Same. Emotions.

*****

The parts I highlighted:

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the
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 poet and another fig was a
brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and
another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig
was Constantin 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 this 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.”

and

"Then plan after plan started leaping through my head, like a family of scatty rabbits."

and

"…but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cray for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full."

and

"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."

and from the Biographical Note (about the author), from an actual letter that Plath wrote

"I have been wanting to do this for ten years but had a terrible block about Writing A Novel. Then suddenly in beginning negotiations with a New York publisher for an American edition of my poems, the dykes broke and I stayed awake all night seized by fearsome excitement, saw how it should be done, started the next day & go every morning to my borrowed study as to an office & belt out more of it."