Jessica Stilling's 3 favorite reads in 2023

When I was writing my book about Sylvia Plath, I read many Plath biographies and began to discern which ones were going to teach me something and which ones were not. This book went beyond learning; it made me feel the life of Sylvia Plath.

From the gelatin and raw hamburger meals that abounded in shiny, 1950s America, to the cold chills she felt in a flat in London, all by herself with two very young children months before her suicide, I understood where Plath came from on a much more visceral level.

This biography also showed me just how strange Plath was. She is painted in so many places as an all-America girl, who got good grades, a scholarship to Smith, and was always popular with the ”right” kind of marriage-able 1950s boys until, of course, she had a mental breakdown.

This biography showed me that Plath never really conformed to those shiny post-war American dreams. She liked darkness, she liked sex, and she wanted her life to be a great big adventure. The Sylvia Ms. Clark shows is the Plath of the Ariel poems: raw, brilliant, an outsider. It also shows that so much of her good-girl image, an image she cultivated, came from her social class and the need to always impress, to show her worth, as a poor scholarship student.

This biography pushed the envelope so much on Plath research that it will be hard to do better. 

I have always loved things (books, films, museum exhibits) that make me feel that the universe is so very, very big, and I am so very, very small. The awe that comes with eternity and such vastness has always had a place deep, so deep, in my soul.

During the summer of 2007, I read Albert Camus’ The Stranger and that book hit a place in my soul so hard, I don’t think it’s come loose. The bleak existentialism, the rawness of the narration, the concrete and abstract images of North Africa, were like nothing I’d ever read before – part philosophy, part travel literature, all high art.

Since that summer, I have been searching for a way to return to that feeling I felt when I first read The Stranger. I read Camus’ other works, and they were fine, but not The Stranger. I tried Jean-Paul Sartre since the two are always compared, and Sartre’s great, but he wasn’t The Stranger great. I tried others, but they did not measure up.

But, I finally found it this summer when I read Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. This book follows an American couple traveling in North Africa after World War II. The country, in fact the world, is still reeling from the war, and the stain of colonialism can be seen in the way the French collide with the native Arab population. But it is the healthy dose of existentialism, the bleak, life is vast and empty and meaningless feeling, that truly shines here.

 “How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.” – The Sheltering Sky.

At the end of the day, this book is so, so very big, and we are so, so, so very small. 

This book hurt me. It really, really hurt me. First, it gave me hope. Then, it gave me a sinking feeling deep in my chest, followed by a sense of hopelessness and despair that really struck a nerve. And because it was all fiction and I was completely safe, it was an awesome and beautiful experience.

This novel explores a Puerto Rican American family living in Staten Island, New York, set in two timelines: the 1990s and today (in a nebulous time, pre-COVID). This book explores the Ramirez family as they grapple with the disappearance of the middle child, Ruthy, in the ‘90s.

Ruthy navigates 1990s New York with the reader while in the present day, her two sisters, Jessica and Nina, find a girl on TV that they believe looks a lot like Ruthy on a reality TV show. The present-day part of the novel not only explores the mystery of what happened to Ruthy all those years ago, it also explores their relationship with their mother and the strong bonds of this family.

The Ruthy sections, which take place over the day Ruthy went missing, raise the stakes at every turn as we learn that Ruthy’s best friend, whom she’s just started fighting with, has been molested by family members for most of her childhood.

This novel tackles many tough issues and culminates with the idea that women are still not entirely safe in our society. It doesn’t matter if you have a group of friends and a solid family fighting for you, sometimes when you’re a girl in the world, the world is incredibly and unfairly dangerous.

This book will make you love this family, you’ll want to root for them and because of that, it will make you so, so angry at the scary world we’ve created for so many women.