Committed: A Memoir of Finding Meaning in Madness

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Description

When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s and grieving the loss of her mother, she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

After nearly three years and countless experimental treatments, Suzanne left the ward on shaky legs. In the decades it took her to recover from the experience, Suzanne came to understand her suffering as part of something larger: a long tradition of women whose complicated and compromised stories of self-discovery are reduced to 'madwoman' narratives.

Transporting, honest, and unflinching, Suzanne recounts her story alongside her reading of writers from the 'madwoman canon' - including Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sylvia Plath and radical feminist Shulamith Firestone. The result is a profoundly moving journey through madness, from breakdown to breakthrough, and a revelatory exploration of being a woman and being mad - and how interwoven those experiences can be.

Author Bio

Suzanne Scanlon is a feminist writer, educator and mental health advocate and is the author of two works of fiction published by indie presses: Promising Young Women (Dorothy, 2012) and Her 37th Year, An Index (Noemi Press, 2015). Her writing has appeared in Granta, BOMB Magazine, Iowa Review and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She teaches creative writing. Committed is her first work of nonfiction.