The Journey of a Madwoman: Between Facts, Memory, and a Fractured Self

I started with a walk. The walk would lead me into the past. It took me to a hospital. A hospital that was no longer a hospital. That was the idea. I would describe the hospital, my home. If I could walk, I could remember. It wasn’t nostalgia. My memory is disordered. The building had an order. The book could hold the memory of my disordered mind. Anne Sexton: Not that it was beautiful, / but that, in the end, there was / a certain sense of order there; / something worth learning / in that narrow diary of my mind, / in the commonplaces of the asylum . I would describe the brick, the lasting grandeur and the dense order of its design would become my book and my book would be a place to live. Every good story is two stories said Grace Paley and so this was true too with Committed — the book a story of the past, a time I spent in a place, but also the story of the person telling the story: this woman who can’t stop herself from walking back to the brick building. She will attempt to walk herself into the past through geography, photography, medical records, and notebooks. I assemble my materials, I do my field work. I know the walk is a pretense; everything I write is an elegy. I have no choice. I know I pretend to walk into a past self when in fact what I know most about those years is that I was a no-self and that no-self of me was what I thought my problem was. I thought I was supposed to have a self. So what I look for now is something more like the self who was seeking a self who because the self writing this story about a coherent self she no longer believes in. Self as a fixed thing. David Foster Wallace on what we can learn from Kafka: The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. […]

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