“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
If you’ve read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath and found yourself hooked by its raw beauty, emotional depth, and exploration of mental health, you’re not alone. This timeless classic continues to resonate with readers on the back of its deeply personal depiction of depression, identity, and the pressures faced by women in society. Whether you’re looking for books like The Bell Jar that dive into psychological complexity, or novels that match Plath’s lyrical style and feminist themes, this is the list for you. From literary fiction to haunting coming-of-age stories, join us at What We Reading as we present these books that offer similar emotional intensity, introspection, and unforgettable female voices. Some explore the darkness of the human mind, others demonstrate the struggles for self-understanding in a world that demands conformity.
The Bell Jar Summary
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is a haunting, semi-biographical novel that explores a young woman’s descent into depression. Set in the 1950s, the story follows Esther Greenwood, a bright and ambitious college student who wins a prestigious scholarship in New York City. Yet, beneath the surface of success and glamour, Esther begins to unravel both mentally and emotionally.
Struggling with societal expectations, identity, and a growing feeling of isolation, she finds herself falling into a deep psychological crisis. With sharp, lyrical prose, Plath captures the suffocating effects of mental illness, what she famously likens to being trapped beneath a bell jar. Often cited as one of the best books about mental health and womanhood, The Bell Jar is dark, introspective, emotionally profound, and a modern classic that explores the fragility of the mind.
My Year Of Rest And Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh
Kicking off our list of the best books like The Bell Jar is Ottessa Moshfegh’s acclaimed novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Darkly comic, unsettling, and strangely hypnotic, the story follows a young woman living in early 2000s New York who decides to spend a whole year asleep. Beautiful, wealthy, and recently orphaned, she’s detached from the world and numbed by apathy. Looking for an escape from her pain and the pressures around her, she sets out on an absurd experiment – using a cocktail of sleeping pills, antidepressants, and dubious psychiatric advice to shut herself off entirely.
Much like The Bell Jar, this novel explores depression, identity, and the disintegration of the self with sharp wit and emotional depth. Moshfegh’s narrator is both unlikeable and oddly relatable, her sense of detachment masking a deep, aching vulnerability.
Prozac Nation – Elizabeth Wurtzel
Often lauded as a modern-day Bell Jar, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation is a harrowing story about breakdowns, suicide attempts, drug therapy, and an eventual journey back to living. This poignant and at times hilarious book gives voice to the high incidence of depression among America’s youth.
A collective cry for help from a generation who have come of age firmly entrenched in the culture of divorce, economic instability, and AIDS, this is an intensely personal story of a young girl full of promise, whose mood swings have risen and fallen much like the lines in a sombre ballad.
Girl, Interrupted – Susanna Kaysen
Another one of the best memoirs like The Bell Jar, Girl, Interrupted opens in 1967 with eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen being put in a taxi after a session with a psychiatrist she’d never met before, being sent to McLean Hospital. She spent the majority of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital, as renowned for its A-list clientele – including Sylvia Plath – as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.
Kaysen’s memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid depictions of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliantly evocation of a “parallel universe” set within the shiting landscapes of the swinging late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
The Vegetarian – Han Kang
Before the nightmares started, Yeong-hye and her husband lived a normal, controlled life. But the dreams – invasive images of blood and brutality – torture her, driving Yeong-hye to cleanse her mind and swear off eating meat altogether. It’s a small act of independence, but one that soon interrupts her marriage and kicks into gear an increasingly disturbing chain of events at home. As her husband, brother-in-law, and sister each wrestle with reasserting control, Yeong-hye obsessively defends the decision that has become sacred to her.
Soon, their attempts become even more desperate, subjecting first her mind and then her body to ever more intrusive and pervasive violations, sending Yeong-hye hurtling toward a dangerous, bizarre separation, not only from those closest to her, but also from herself. Dark, disturbing, and exceptionally personal, The Vegetarian is the perfect book to read after The Bell Jar.
Check Out The Best Books Like The Vegetarian
Intermezzo – Sally Rooney
Despite being brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek appear to have very little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties – successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of his father’s death, he’s taken to medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationship with two very different women in his life – his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always viewed himself as a socially awkward loner, the antithesis of his glib older brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, he meets Margaret, an elderly woman recovering from her own turbulent past. Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo is a 2024 literary fiction novel that follows the two brothers and the people they love. Similar to The Bell Jar, it explores desire, despair and possibility; offering a window into how much one life might hold inside itself without snapping.
Dept. Of Speculation – Jenny Offill
Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation is a fragmented, lyrical exploration of a woman’s inner life as her marriage begins to shatter. Told through a series of vignettes, observations, and philosophical musings, the novel orbits around an unnamed narrator – a writer, mother, and wife – wrestling with identity, love, creativity, and the quiet, invisible toll of emotional strain. What starts out as a story of romance and domestic hope soon unravels into a raw portrait of anxiety, self-doubt, and disconnection.
This is a perfect read for anyone who loved The Bell Jar, who is drawn to psychologically complex, introspective fiction with a strong female voice at its heart. Offill’s sharp, poetic prose captures the claustrophobic feel of mental and emotional exhaustion, particularly in the face of life’s everyday demands.
Bunny (Bunny #1) – Mona Awad
Samantha Heather Maceky could hardly be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort – a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call one another Bunny, and who seem to move and speak as one.
Yet, everything changes when Samantha is surprisingly invited to join the Bunnies’ fabled Smut Salon. As she is immersed further and further into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, the edges of reality begin to blur. One of the most lauded books like The Bell Jar, Bunny charts the female experience, exploring loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic, terrible power of the imagination.
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The Trick Is To Keep Breathing – Janice Galloway
Janice Galloway’s The Trick Is to Keep Breathing is a raw, intimate portrayal of a woman’s battle with depression and disconnection. Set in Scotland, the novel centres around Joy Stone, a drama teacher in her thirties whose life quietly unravels after the death of her married lover. As grief consumes her, Joy struggles with eating disorders, anxiety, and a profound feeling of isolation. Her thoughts spiral between the mundane and the existential, revealing the fragmented and sometimes overwhelming experience of living with mental illness.
Told in a stream-of-consciousness style, the novel blends diary entries, inner monologue, magazine snippets, and stage directions to match Joy’s unstable mental state. Galloway’s experimental structure and brutally honest prose make this a standout in psychological fiction. For anyone looking for books like The Bell Jar, this haunting and powerful story is an absolute must-read in the landscape of feminist literary fiction.
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Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
