Support adaptation of Sylvia Plath's iconic novel

In 2022, when I had just launched Joy Coalition, I was working on a call to action with US Surgeon General Murthy’s team on how storytellers could respond to the youth mental health crisis. Around that time, a young woman at HarperCollins came to me with The Bell Jar.

Much of my narrative change work as a Producer has been mental health focused — from Next to Normal to 13 Reasons Why — so my first call was to longtime collaborator Dr. Christine Moutier at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. She agreed immediately: an adaptation of The Bell Jar that reaches a multigenerational, global audience could be more than a culture-changing film — it could be a public health intervention. Because The Bell Jar, the fictionalized account of Sylvia Plath’s transformative year as a college girl named Esther Greenwood, is a story of survival, hope, and help-seeking, and the coming of age of a literary genius.

I’m sure many of you remember reading it as young women — Esther staring at that iconic fig tree, overwhelmed by possibility, paralyzed by choice. For this generation, the fig tree is a forest — options coming at young women in social media clips, so many paths visible and none of them clear. Which is probably why Sixty-three years later, the book is more popular than ever. The fig tree and Sylvia Plath quotes circulate constantly on BookTok. Women of all ages are still finding themselves inside this story.

The fund supports our full impact infrastructure: Frieda Hughes as consultant, AFSP and Dr. Moutier embedded in the process, partnerships with the JED Foundation and Youth Mental Health Corps, a Bell Jar Scholarship through Scholarship America, and impact evaluation through UCLA.

The Bell Jar ensures the film is made responsibly and released with real impact infrastructure behind it from inception. We’re looking for mission-aligned partners who believe this story matters — and who want to help resource it properly.