There is a moment for me, when reading a piece of writing, when art breaches the boundary between self-expression and embodiment. Many works eventually approach this threshold. But while reading Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley, there is no such boundary—no singular moment when the work transforms from fiction into something more intimate. There is no moment of genuine embodiment because the entire novel reads like a poem of mourning, a eulogy, a confes

I read The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath in my twenties, and no piece of writing has ever felt more like home to me. I don’t recall every minute detail of the story, but I remember how I felt reading it—the emotions it carried, and the emotions within myself that it seemed to recognize. I carried those feelings with me for years, but most of all, I carried you, Esther Greenwood, describing your descent into madness and your eventual ascension out of it. I saw myself in both versio