Meg Wolitzer Gets Inspiration From Sylvia Plath in New YA Novel

By Dianna Dilworth 

belzhar_custom-361c0db947a535a4c4d293f4127847c2547cc338-s2-c85Author Meg Wolitzer is working on a new YA novel inspired by Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar called Belzhar.

“My narrator is a sixteen-year-old girl named Jam Gallahue who’s dealing with a tragic loss. She’s sent to a boarding school in Vermont for “emotionally fragile, highly intelligent” teenagers. While there, she is put into a tiny, elite class that reads only one writer a semester. And this semester the class is reading Sylvia Plath,” Wolitzer explained in an interview with NPR. “Plath’s work, and her emotional problems, not to mention her journal-writing, take on important dimensions for all the students in the class, who are also asked to write in their own journals, and who, when they do, experience something startling.”

Dutton Children’s Books, an imprint of Penguin, will publish the new work in September.