She lies about her identity to every stranger she meets. She tries and fails to write a novel and loses the ability to sleep, read, write, or eat. She stops bathing or changing her clothes. Stuck at home in the suburbs, Esther’s mental illness, which was nascent in New York, amplifies into suicidal depression.
On her last visit to the sanatorium, she rejected Buddy’s marriage proposal and broke her leg skiing.īack at home near Boston, Esther is rejected from a writing course she had planned to spend the rest of the summer taking. Buddy is currently suffering from TB, but Esther plans to break up with him as soon as he gets better.
Throughout her time in New York, Esther flashes back to her troubled relationship with Buddy Willard, a handsome know-it-all medical student who Esther once admired and is now disgusted by, having realized Buddy is a hypocrite for projecting a virginal public image even after he’s had a sexual affair. She goes on a string of bad dates, the best of which feels anticlimactic when the Constantin, an interpreter, makes no romantic advances and the worst of which ends with the misogynistic Marco trying to rape her. She worries about the rigid expectations of virginity, maternity, and wifeliness that society (and her mother) holds for young women and feels paralyzed by her contradictory desires for her own future. Esther vacillates between wanting to be wholesome, like her friend Betsy, and wanting to break all rules, like her friend Doreen. Though Esther knows she should be enjoying herself, she feels only numb and detached from the old ambitious self that her boss, editor Jay Cee, tries to motivate. Esther lives with the other girls at the Amazon, a woman’s hotel, and attends a steady stream of events and parties hosted by the magazine. In the summer of 1953, Esther Greenwood, a brilliant college student, wins a month to work as guest editor with eleven other girls at a New York magazine.
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