The Bell Jar

CRAB-STUFFED AVOCADOS

Sylvia Plath holds a special place in my heart, because her childhood home was directly across the street from the house I grew up in. As a child, I spent many long hours staring at the window I imagined was her bedroom. It seemed incredible to me that such a simple box of a house, with its white clapboard siding and shiny black shutters, could have contained a mind so enormous.

I didn’t know about Plath until I was in fourth grade, when my mom casually told me that a very famous writer named Sylvia Plath had grown up in the house across the street. At the time, I was up to my ears in the Redwall and Golden Compass series, filled with dreams of someday becoming a writer. I simply could not believe that a very famous female writer had grown up across the street and my mom had never thought to tell me about it.

This was, of course, pre-Google, a world in which you did not have access to every intimate detail of a person’s life at the click of a button. So that afternoon I rode my bike to the library. I asked the librarian where I could find Sylvia Plath’s books, and she looked at me in a concerned way but led me to the stacks. I spent hours on the floor of the library that day, trying to make sense of just one line of Plath’s poetry, but I left with only a vague sense of dread that I would never be happy again once I turned ten.

I spent the next decade staring out the window at the white house across the street and attempting to read Plath’s poetry, but it wasn’t until my junior year of high school, when my favorite English teacher gave me The Bell Jar, that I found Plath accessible for the first time. In this semiautobiographical novel, which Plath published under the pen name Victoria Lucas in 1963, a young woman named Esther Greenwood travels to New York City for a summer internship at Ladies’ Day magazine.

Esther ultimately has to leave New York after suffering a mental breakdown, and the novel follows her descent into mental illness as she attempts suicide on multiple occasions, is put in an asylum, and receives treatment from various doctors (including electroshock therapy and insulin injections). Plath eases the reader into Esther’s degeneration with such subtlety that it takes a moment to realize that Esther has truly and completely lost her mind. The novel is bleak, there is no denying it, but I found Esther so likable (though I’ve heard others say different) and her voice so original that I kept reading it just to root for her.

When Esther first arrives in New York, before everything begins to fall apart for her, she goes to a luncheon for Ladies’ Day. It was this passage, about Esther’s relationship with food, that made me fall for her right away—I love a girl who isn’t shy about pigging out at an elegant affair. Surrounded by young women too timid and dainty to eat, Esther begins to load up her plate, emboldened by her belief that “if you do something incorrect at a table with a certain arrogance,” and act as if you know exactly what you are doing, “nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.”

With this philosophy in her back pocket, Esther approaches the food at the luncheon fearlessly, piling caviar on thin slices of chicken before moving on to “tackle the avocado and crabmeat salad.” Avocados, Esther explains, are her favorite fruit. Every Sunday, her grandfather would bring her “an avocado pear hidden at the bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics.” He taught her how to eat avocados by filling their hollows with a special garnet sauce he made from grape jelly and French dressing. Esther eats the avocado and crabmeat and feels “homesick for that sauce. The crabmeat tasted bland in comparison.”

Almost immediately after the luncheon Esther and all the other girls fall violently ill with food poisoning. In the haze of her illness, Esther envisions “avocado pear after avocado pear being stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise and photographed under brilliant lights.” She sees “the delicate, pink-mottled claw meat poking seductively through its blanket of mayonnaise and the bland yellow pear cup with its rim of alligator-green cradling the whole mess.”

There is something wonderfully kitschy about a crabmeat-stuffed avocado, but I can’t imagine that what Esther ate that day would appeal to most of us now (I’m thinking lots and lots of mayonnaise). This crab salad is bright and fresh, loaded with herbs and fresh lemon juice—and no mayonnaise in sight.

THE BELL JAR

Crab-Stuffed Avocados

Makes 4 stuffed avocado halves

1 pound fresh crabmeat, picked over

Juice of 1 lemon (about ¼ cup)

3 tablespoons olive oil

2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh parsley

2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh dill

2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh cilantro

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

2 ripe avocados, halved and pitted

Toss together the crabmeat, lemon juice, olive oil, and herbs in a large glass bowl and season with salt and pepper to taste. Divide the salad evenly among the four avocado halves and serve.