It was the summer of 1979, and we were all winners of Mademoiselle magazine’s Guest Editor competition; the same college contest that Sylvia Plath had once won, and which I had often thought of as “The Bell Jar contest.” I had entered in part because I had a bit of a preoccupation with Plath. Not seriously, not like someone I had known at Smith who dressed in black and called herself Sivvy, Plath’s nickname. 
      
I wasn’t depressive, and I wasn’t even a poet, but at age 20 it was easy to feel a connection. Plath had also been a student at Smith when she won the contest 26 years earlier, and while I hoped my time in New York City would be happier than hers had been, I also hoped there would be some overlap. After all, despite the uneasy, increasingly desperate mood-state described in “The Bell Jar,” the first part of the novel is set against a backdrop of big-city glamour. I imagined a group of young women in chic little outfits striding across marble office-building lobbies, and going out at night for drinks with Yale men, to whom they might lose their virginity.