Suzanne Scanlon’s Memoir Confronts the Stories We Don’t Tell About Women and Madness

Suzanne Scanlon’s book, Committed: A Memoir of Finding Meaning in Madness , is a memoir unlike any I’ve read. Scanlon returns to the landscape of the past, reflecting on her experience of being committed in the New York State Psychiatric Hospital while a student at Barnard in the late 1990s. Scanlon explores her own history with the granular attention of a novelist, beginning with her mother’s death when Scanlon was a child, tracing the ways this grief remade her and her family in different ways. But what I found most compelling about Committed is Scanlon’s attention to the larger narratives of madness and madwomen in particular. She reflects on her own reading in this time, writing incisively about how narratives about madness by women gave her new vocabulary in ways both helpful and harmful. Drawing from these women writers as well as her own archive of journals and hospital documents, Committed offers a timely insight into what institutionalization can make possible and how literary representation can change how we think, feel, and live our experiences. We spoke over zoom in May about the power of reading, the narrative demands of healing, and the challenges of writing honestly about the past. Bekah Waalkes: I was really struck by how many texts you reference and think with: Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals , Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces , Marguerite Duras’ The Lover , Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar . Can you talk about how you formed this personal archive, and how being a reader shaped your experiences? Suzanne Scanlon: I mean, I wouldn’t be a writer without being a reader. I’m a reader first. It’s still the case, you know, that I am constantly thinking through ideas and having conversations through books, through thinking about artists or writers. And not just the work of writers, but also how they lived in the world, how they wrote, how they were writers over time, how their body of work developed. So my entire conception of myself as a writer has been through reading. It wasn’t something I had to make an effort to do. […]

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