Committed

A Memoir of Finding Meaning in Madness

Suzanne Scanlon

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Paperback

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English

John Murray
13 February 2025

Biography; Memoirs; Gender studies: women; Coping with illness

'A deep, sometimes harrowing book about loss, grief, and the way literary representations of mental illness shaped Scanlon's experience of her own life' Emily Gould, The Cut

'Visceral, raw and tender, this candid and timely memoir is, at heart, a love-letter to the profound and redemptive power of literature' Annabel Abbs

'An immensely talented writer, at her finest, cutting through propriety and convention to reach what is essential, meaningful, real' Amina Cain

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, Committed is a story of discovery and recovery, reclaiming the idea of the madwoman as a template for insight and transcendence through the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, Shulamith Firestone and others.

By: Suzanne Scanlon
Imprint: John Murray
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 130mm, Spine: 28mm
Weight: 260g
ISBN: 9781399804844
ISBN 10: 1399804847
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 13 February 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Suzanne Scanlon is the author of two works of fiction: 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 non-fiction.