W-3

Originally published in 1974, when Howland was thirty-seven, W-3 is one hell of a debut . . . It offers us a portal to a particular time and place, yet the compassion and truthfulness that underlies the writing renders it timeless, as urgent a read now as when it was first written nearly half a century ago. -- Lucy Scholes * Paris Review * A devastating memoir . . . bracingly modern. Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves. -- Sarah Hughes * The i * A story about her neighbor's heart, not her own-an anthology of the lives she encounters in the ward known as W-3. [Howland tells] the story of a collective with blunt clarity, and sidestepping the genre's potential for sentimentality or sensationalism. She brings the particularities of the world to life -- Parul Sehgal * New York Times * Full of calibrated grace, and startlingly unmediated . . . [W-3] is remarkably perceptive and wise -- Katy Waldman * New Yorker * A master of silences, of the unsaid, of what cannot be addressed -- Jenessa Abrams * Guernica * Howland's powers of observation are like military-grade weapons. * University of Chicago Magazine * [Her] sentences continue to beat with a stylish percussion and a glowing heart -- Donna Rifkind * Wall Street Journal * Howland tracks our madnesses and oddnesses . . . Her work lies in a borderland between sociology and poetry -- Abigail Deutsch * Harper's Magazine * Bette Howland wrote a book I thought was impossible to write. -- Yiyun Li Among the many chronicles of depression and psych wards, Howland's is uniquely arresting in its omniscient attention, radiant artistry, zealously pursued insights, and abiding respect for those who share her struggle. -- Donna Seaman In W-3, Bette Howland continues to help us re-imagine the depth and breadth of humanity that a single book can contain, not only in her willingness to portray the vicissitudes of her own experience, but to observe, to empathize, to listen to and take such care with the individuals she encounters along the way. -- Lynn Steger Strong, author of <i>Want</i> W-3 is a portrayal of mental illness like none other. More claustrophobic than Girl, Interrupted and more frightening than The Bell Jar, Howland's memoir maps the world of a 1970s psychiatric ward with an unflinching eye. -- Esme Weijun Wang, author of <i>The Collected Schizophrenias</i> Bette Howland is at her best when her keenly observing eye is turned outward. Watching, always watching, she misses nothing, grasps everything, and puts it all together with an originality and cogency that are rare and memorable . . . she writes as if she were a participant-observer, a novelist-anthropologist in a strange, often perplexing new place. -- Johanna Kaplan * Commentary * In an earlier book, W-3, the moving and heroically funny account of Miss Howland's stay in the psychiatric ward of a university hospital after she had swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills, her tough and resilient personality brought a remarkably clearheaded way of seeing and knowing to that chaotic refuge of the dispossessed. * The New York Times * I was much moved by W-3. It is admirably straight and thoughtful, tough-minded but full of powerful feeling. The patients of W-3, black and white, men and women, dizzy, endearing, suicidal, doomed, come to us from these pages not as case studies but as our own brothers and sisters. No poses are struck and no vain gestures made in this brave and honorable book. Bette Howland is a real writer. -- Saul Bellow, Nobel Prize winning author of <i>Seize the Day</i>