In the summer of 1953, through Mademoiselle's "College Board Contest," Plath had secured a position as a guest editor, and The Bell Jar is considered a barely veiled account of that experience. As Esther Greenwood, the novel's protagonist, explains, "They gave us jobs in New York for a month, expenses paid, and piles and piles of free bonuses, like ballet tickets and passes to fashion shows and hair stylings at a famous expensive salon and chances to meet successful people in the field of our desire and advice about what to do with our particular complexions."

By 1996, when I was one of Glamour's "Top Ten College Women," the other winners and I found ourselves in New York not for a month but for three days. Otherwise, however, virtually nothing had changed: We visited the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Stock Exchange, met female "role models" including Madeleine Albright and Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp-and got hair highlights. Among our "free bonuses" were T-shirts that read " Glamour … All that matters." With neither irony nor obliviousness, I wore this T-shirt for several years afterward.

And yet, during the trip, what I mostly felt was a sense of embarrassment. I was embarrassed that I'd entered the contest in the first place, a choice that I feared reeked of both immodesty and sheer dorkiness. Having previously visited New York on many occasions, I was embarrassed by the "take a bite out of the Big Apple" tone of our schedule, as if we were all Nebraska farm kids from the 1950's. And, wearing Doc Martens and no makeup, I was embarrassed to find myself smack in the bosom of a beauty magazine; God forbid it seem like I was aspiring to something and falling short, as opposed to not aspiring at all. The night we went to see Savion Glover in Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk, we were whisked backstage afterward to chat with some of the back-up dancers (and by "chat," of course, I mean that I stood on the periphery scowling while the bolder young women made inquisitive conversation). Upon learning that our coterie came from Glamour, one dancer asked if we were models. "For Christ's sake," I wanted to exclaim, "look at us!"

This is not to say that the other girls weren't attractive. They definitely were pretty, but they weren't model-pretty. And to find yourself at a magazine called Glamour, being praised for your intelligence-it was all just a little weird. Glamour was then and is now one of the more feminist women's magazines, which is less of an oxymoron than many people seem to realize; but still, at the end of the day, it's called Glamour.

Plath's Esther Greenwood explains, "I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn't get myself to react." This was how I felt at the various events at which we were called upon to introduce ourselves. We all had particular interests-politics! science! writing!-and the girl next to me would say, beauty-pageant-style, "I am Esmerelda Ann Smith. I hail from Tuscaloosa, Ala., and I hope to found a charter school for blind children." Then it would be my turn, and I'd grunt, "I'm Curtis." Yet despite my best efforts, I had difficulty maintaining scorn for my fellow Glamour girls, who were conducting economic research in Latin America, founding chamber-music groups, earning black belts in martial arts I'd never even heard of and (really) developing methods to grow food on manned space flights to Mars. They weren't faux-smart or faux-articulate; they were actually smart and actually articulate, and they had way better manners than I did.

On our last night, as we were posing for pictures outside Lincoln Center, the photographer asked us to kick out our legs cancan style. The resulting picture-which for years made my siblings scream with laughter-shows all the other girls in a line, lifting their knees and beaming, and me on the end, in a dowdy black dress and huge plastic glasses, frowning and not kicking my legs at all. Naturally, this picture ran in the magazine. What didn't run was the one taken a minute later, when the other girls suddenly decided there needed to be a photo in which I was in the middle and swarmed around me, basically hugging me from all sides while still grinning for the camera. I was, they seemed to have decided, gruff and odd but essentially lovable. That night, a bunch of us stayed up late talking in one of the hotel rooms, and as we exchanged information about our lives away from this weird three-day interlude, a surprising but not entirely unfamiliar feeling came over me. I was having … fun. I think of this night as my last slumber party.

The contradiction of women's magazines, and of much of women's culture, is, in my opinion, similar to the contradiction of Sylvia Plath, and specifically of the popular image of her: the uncomfortable mix of intelligent and vapid, substantive and superficial. And what seems a shame (if not a very surprising one) is how, in the public imagination, both women's magazines and Sylvia Plath herself get defined by their most obvious, least positive aspects: All women's magazines do is tell you how to slim your thighs and snag a man, and all Sylvia Plath was, in the end, was a lady poet who killed herself while still young and good-looking. That these ideas are false makes them no less easy or irresistible.

And so when people compare you to Sylvia Plath, they never really mean it as a compliment. At best, they're affectionately teasing, at worst they're mocking, but what they mean either way is that you (and your writing) are girlishly neurotic, as if girlish neuroses are somehow less significant than, say, manly neuroses. Given what people mean when they invoke Sylvia Plath, I'd have to say I don't feel particularly Sylvia Plath–ish these days-I like to think my life now contains more womanly neuroses than girlish ones-and yet I was compared to her as recently as a few weeks ago.

In an act of either narcissism or masochism, I found myself reading a blog which critiqued my work thusly: "To be fair to her, she's actually quite a good writer when she's doing fiction, albiet [ sic] she's an honors graduate of the Sylvia Plath Wannabe school of angsty short story writing, with a major in navel-gazing and minors in passivity studies and the too-much-information arts." Really, I thought, is that the best you can do?

I just reread The Bell Jar for the first time since high school, and though I'd loved it back then, I feared it wouldn't hold up under my more jaded 29-year-old analysis. But I loved it all over again. It's well-written, hilarious, heartbreaking and stuffed with terrific details. Though Plath's Ariel poems, reissued in a "restored edition" in November, are considered her greatest legacy, for me it is this novel that serves as a reminder of who she was before she was a symbol: a writer, and a very talented one. I'll never know, of course, but as I read, the thought occurred to me many times: Maybe, just maybe, Sylvia Plath didn't feel that Sylvia Plath–ish most of the time, either.

Curtis Sittenfeld's first novel, Prep, is out this month from Random House.

I'm not quite sure what I have come to expect in East Village eateries, but a scene out of Brighton Beach would not be it. At Svoboda on a recent evening, however, all we needed was a whirling mirrored disco ball and a bottle of vodka in a block of ice on the table to make us think we were at the National in Brooklyn. Apart from a couple in the corner who were eating their dinner in a gloomy, Dostoyevskian silence, the life of the party (and the only other people in the dining room) was a group of Russians seated at a large round table. They didn't exactly look the East Village type. Instead of nose rings and Doc Martens, the men, who were beefy and thickset, sported close haircuts and black leather jackets. They talked on cellular phones during dinner as their companions, tall, lanky blondes, held on to their fur coats and tapped their fingers to the old disco hits (such as Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," sounding as if it was being sung in Russian) that blared over the sound system.

As for the décor, the press release was right, it is certainly "different." You enter through a little vestibule into a long, narrow room with a stone floor, arched ceiling and a large bar. It feels like a cellar in a medieval castle. "It's how I imagine a Marriott bar might look like in Tirana, Albania," muttered my husband as we sat down.

Plastic beacons and bas-reliefs of body parts protrude from the walls, which are painted gold and sepia. Polished wooden tables are set with white napkins and salt and pepper shakers made from recycled miniature liquor bottles. Upstairs is a dark cigar lounge (with a humidor, de rigueur in trendy restaurants today) and bar where you can also eat, but from a limited menu.

"A great place to have an affair if you are hiding from the Upper East Side," said one of my friends, a German who recently returned from Umbria, Italy. (During the recent earthquakes, he claimed, the valleys echoed with the sound of cuckoo clocks falling from the walls.)

When you first look at the menu, which is bound in stainless steel and divided into sections invitingly described as Drink Me, Eat Me, Smoke Me, you began to wonder if something has been lost in the translation. "Shark bites, tempura-battered mako shark nuggets served with fire fries and chipotle tartar sauce: they're killer [sic]" was one dashing entry. "Screaming oysters" were bluepoints sautéed in olive oil, garlic, sake, oyster sauce and Vietnamese garlic chili paste. We opted instead (rather bravely, I thought) for "Taste of the World," a hot antipasto platter made up of the chef's choices for the evening, and the "Freedom Quesadilla," which was a pretty straightforward combination of chicken, cilantro, fontina and mushrooms.

Meanwhile, our friendly young waiter, who had a thick Russian accent and was from St. Petersburg, brought us a bottle of inexpensive South African red wine he recommended, Kleinbosch 1977. (The wine list is short; vodkas, port and cognacs seem more the thing at Svoboda, but his choice was excellent.)

I liked the chicken wings in the "Taste of the World" platter, but I wasn't crazy about the waffle fries and various doughy things, including something cheesy on crostini that was rather hard to identify . They probably would go down fine if you were on your third or fourth vodka. A first-course special of the day, maki roll stuffed with eel, avocado, scallions and rice with a soy dipping sauce, was delicious, however, worthy of the best of sushi bars.

"Well, if this is the Russian notion of diversity, it is something else!" said my German friend, looking bemused as he took a bite of maki roll and helped himself to a slice of quesadilla.

The chef, Gregory Samuels, a former sous-chef at the Quilted Giraffe, has said his aim is to present "freestyle food on a three-star level." Not surprisingly, it is somewhat hit-or-miss. I followed the "Taste of the World" with "Treasures of the World," which consisted of six kinds of grilled fish and seafood served on spinach and cabbage in a ceramic oyster dish. It was a better choice than the braised lamb shanks in marsala, which were tepid, and a special of bland, mushy Chilean sea bass. The other special of the day, "black-and-blue steak in bourbon sauce," as the waiter put it, intrigued my husband.

"Bring it as black and blue as the chef can make it," he said to the waiter. "I like my steak as rare as it gets."

"This is not black and blue," said my husband a while later, staring down at the bits of sliced steak the waiter set down in front of him. "This is black and gray."

The waiter apologized and took the plate back to the kitchen.

"It will be a few minutes," he said upon his return.

"If it's a few minutes, the steak will be overcooked again."

This time, however, it was rare, but did not have much taste. The best dish was the tuna, which was first-rate, a fresh thick piece seared in a crust of sesame seeds and served nicely rare, with grilled baby bok choy.

As we were finishing our main courses, the chef, a tall young man in whites, came out from the kitchen.

"The steak had a sticker for 'medium' in it," he said, looking quite displeased.

For dessert, we opted for the "Svobodlava" ("phyllo volcano with nut-chocolate-honey filling on fire and a burnt sugar ice cream topped with raspberry lava"). It was a sort of baked Alaska, with chocolate droppings inside phyllo dough instead of meringue, and was quite good, as was "Death by Chocolate," a chocolate crumb ice cream pie with a gooey hot fudge sauce.

All in all, Svoboda wasn't the greatest restaurant I've ever been to, but the food certainly was better than at the National, where my husband and I ate a few years ago. And at least on the way out, he didn't fall into the trash can and decide to sleep there.

Svoboda*

248 East Fifth Street, at Second Avenue 387-0707

Dress: Leather jackets, fur coats, (11)cellular telephones

Noise level: Fairly loud disco music

Wine list: Short on wines, long on vodka

Credit cards: All major

Price range: Main courses $7.95 to $15.95

Dinner: Daily 5 P.M. to midnight

Cigar lounge: Daily 6:30 P.M. to (11)2 A.M.

* Good

** Very good

*** Excellent

**** Outstanding

No star poor