When Catherine Spino moved home to Boston from New York in 2022 to live with her parents, she seized the opportunity to revisit some of her favorite books from high school.
Among them: “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, which Spino, now a 33-year-old curator and writer, said she hadn’t read “in years.”
The novel, inspired by Plath’s own life, follows 19-year-old Esther Greenwood, a college student from Boston who spends a month of her summer break working as a junior editor at a fictional women’s magazine in New York City. Plath, also a Bostonian, had interned at Mademoiselle for one month in the summer of June 1953, when she was 20.
The protagonist gradually slips into what she calls “the bell jar” — a clinical depression. In real life, Plath struggled with depression as well, and died by suicide at age 30, one month after the British publication of “The Bell Jar” in 1963. (The novel was not published in the United States until 1971.)
Spino connected with the book “really deeply,” she said. And amid its tragedy, she also found delight. “She’s really funny,” Spino said of Plath, “and I think a lot of people forget that about this book.”
When Spino returned to New York in 2023, literary events were experiencing a post-pandemic boom, including marathon readings of classic texts like Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans.”
“I was like, Why hasn’t it been done with Plath?” Spino said.
So she did. On Sunday night, Spino hosted her second annual marathon reading of “The Bell Jar” at Night Club 101 in the East Village.
This year, she selected 40 people — writers, teachers, actors and a visual artist among them — to read live for 10-minute increments apiece (two readers went for 20 to fill in for no-shows). Admission was free, but attendees were asked to donate to the Fund to Prevent Sexual Assault through QR codes taped on the walls, a gesture inspired by the Cornell University rape investigation. (The event raised a little over $400, Spino said later.)
The reading had the feel of a literary séance. At 5:30 p.m., Spino welcomed the audience, opening the event — which was being held in the club’s basement, with dark red walls, a disco ball and wooden benches on the dance floor — by reading the Plath obituary published by this newspaper in 2018, 55 years after Plath’s death. A portrait of the author, who would have turned 94 on Oct. 27, sat behind two bouquets of flowers laid on the stage.
“Esther Greenwood, to me, represents an Everywoman story,” Spino told the attendees.
She then set an analog kitchen timer to allot each reader 10 minutes. “It was a queer, sultry summer …” began Monika Woods, a literary agent and the night’s first reader.
In the rapt audience of about 50 — a number that would expand and contract as attendees ducked in and out — many followed along in their own paperbacks. One woman rocked a newborn on the sidelines, while another sat with two tween girls. Bass from a jazz performance upstairs thumped through the floor, and the kitchen timer ticked audibly onstage.
“For so many young women, Plath is this real portal to literature,” said Jamie Hood, the second reader and the author of the memoir “Trauma Plot.” Hood, 39, had done her graduate school dissertation, in part, on Plath. “She’s someone who lives alongside me in a lot of ways.”
Layla Halabian, 37, a founder of the Substack Language Arts, and the evening’s 16th reader, said, “I am a part of the Tumblr generation,” and it was through that microblogging platform that she discovered the novel. “I would see excerpts and in my early 20s,” she said. “I felt very moved by it.”
A little while later, at 8:40, the group took a break, mingling and refreshing drinks. “My butt is numb from sitting for so long,” one attendee remarked. But there was more to go.
The reading picked back up around 9:05, and the writer Jen Lue took the stage at 9:40 for a 20-minute double shift. “There’s a cultural psychosis when it comes to believing women’s pain,” she said in an interview before the event. “The book exactly depicts that feeling.”
“We’re still dealing with violations to bodily autonomy,” she added. “I don’t think the book is inextricable from the way Plath died, and the way we drive women, and really all people, into these mental health crises in this country.”
At 10:10, Ash Pattison-Scott, a 32-year-old writer and the founder of Close Reading Studio, a writing school in Brooklyn, took the stage. “This book is many creative people’s awakening,” she said earlier in the day. “Getting to read it out loud is like getting to experience your creative awakening again.”
Some attendees were experiencing their first awakening.
Liz Frank, 26, who works in sales, had not read the novel before. She came to support Pattison-Scott, a friend she made through a self-formed writing workshop. “It’s really cool to have so many voices challenging preconceived notions about Plath because everybody reads differently,” she observed.
And while so much of Greenwood’s story was relatable to so many, the fact that the protagonist was housed at the former Barbizon Hotel by her employers, Frank added, “is kind of not so timely.”
Conor Hultman, a 30-year-old writer, was a return attendee, there to write a scene dispatch for the popular literary Substack Zona Motel. Hultman, who said he attends one to three literary readings each week, was impressed by the number of people Spino had gathered to read. “I don’t think you can get people to do that outside of a church service or a funeral,” he said.
Toward the last stretch of the marathon, one woman in a stylish all-red ensemble unabashedly hit her vape from the front row, many of the other benches now emptier than before. Friends of Spino came throughout the evening with necessary fuel — Pop-Tarts, pizza, coffee and Nerds Gummy Clusters among the offerings.
Madeline Howard, 28 and a founder of Late to the Party Press, a monthly reading series at KGB Bar, said, “‘The Bell Jar’ is the poster book of ‘weird girl lit,’ but what does that even mean? That it has to be branded in this niche way to make a woman having mental illness palatable?”
At 12:51 a.m., the final words of Page 244 were read by the writer Nanci Carmona. About eight attendees remained. There was a brief pause, almost a moment of silence, as Carmona got off the stage.
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