The fictional Avocado

Esther Greenwood, the protagonist in Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar loved her avocado.

She reminisces about the "pear" when a literary luncheon gets dreadful:

I bowed my head and secretly eyed the position of the bowls of caviar.... Under cover of the clinking of water goblets and silverware and bone china, I paved my plate with chicken slices. Then I covered the chicken slices with caviar thickly as if I were spreading peanut butter on a piece of bread. Then I picked up the chicken slices in my fingers one by one, rolled them so the caviar wouldn't ooze off and ate them.... Avocados are my favorite fruit. Every Sunday my grandfather used to bring me an avocado pear hidden at the bottom of his briefcase under six soiled shirts and the Sunday comics. He taught me how to eat avocados by melting grape jelly and French dressing together in a saucepan and filling the cup of the pear with the garnet sauce. I felt homesick for that sauce.

The avocado's fortune has waxed and waned in literary representation. In a New Yorker fiction, "Here's the Story" (June 9 & 16, The Summer Fiction Issue of 2014), by David Gilbert, the avocado is used as a figurative bone of contention between a husband and a wife who are unhappily married:

His wife hated avocados, something about the mushy texture reminding her of rotten flesh, as if she were on intimate terms with decay, and no doubt the girls would follow suit, but maybe he could show them the pleasure of the pit, how you could cut around the middle and twist and the halves would come apart at the hard center, a world hidden within a world...and how you could remove the pit and poke in a few toothpicks and rest this Sputnik half submerged in a glass of water, and in a few weeks you'd have the beginnings of a tree right there on the windowsill.