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. It’s almost as if I can’t stop from having these different writers within my own writing because it’s so central to how I’ve understood my own experience. 

BW: One fascinating strand in Committed is how impactful reading is, particularly for young people, but it feels like you problematize a straightforward attachment to books. I guess I’m asking, is reading always good for us?

SS: It’s a very hard thing to talk about, I think, because I absolutely believe in reading wildly and reading everything. But I do think that texts like The Bell Jar opened up a space for me, a space of possibility that maybe wasn’t there in the same way before. After I went with Esther through her experience, her suicide attempts, and into the hospital, that was in my consciousness, though I wouldn’t have said it at the time. Her story was very much something I’d absorbed in terms of a possibility of being human, being a young woman. And also refusing to become a woman and expressing rage at the world: I think The Bell Jar was one of the most satisfying articulations of that.

I think the same thing with Marguerite Duras in The Lover, this desire for a ravishing and probably inappropriate and destructive kind of love affair. All these ways that these writers were offering up as ways to kind of transcend the limits of the world they were born into. 

It’s tricky because I would never ever in a million years say that it wasn’t the best thing to discover that. But I do think it’s serious, how much we’re shaped by media as they would say today. So these books were a profound merging or influence on who I was in those years.  

BW: If we’re thinking about the narrative frames you lean on as their own archives, I’m curious about the silences of these stories, the patchwork way you have to form your own archive. Can you talk about the kinds of stories we don’t tell about women and madness, about women and grief? (Another way to ask this is why do we read so many asylum stories?)

SS: When I was first trying to write the parts that are in the hospital, I was thinking so much about how this was such a formative time in my life. And it was as formative as the four years someone else the same age may have spent in college.

There’s no documentation, there’s no college reunion. There’s no way to stay in touch with the core group of people that were in my day to day life, in a way that that never happened again. I’m never in that day to day kind of living mode with anyone.

Before writing the book, I had such a desire for a reunion. But this impossibility just speaks to the fact that, first of all, many of these people aren’t alive, and if they are, they’re impossible to find.

Yet there’s no way to reconstitute a missing archive. And this became an interesting way for me to think about why I still want to write about it. All that absent archive was so much time in my life. So much. And people were there recording it, recording all of us. We were being observed day to day and yet there’s no coherent way to bring it back to life. 

BW: How did the process of writing unfold? How did you work with your own medical records? I loved when you talked about seeing this book as organized like Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which I was definitely thinking about while reading. There feels like a clear link between the experimental treatment you received and the experiments in form and structure you engage in here. Did you know what form the book would take as you went? How did it change?

SS: I didn’t think the notebooks or the records would be that important to the book. It’s more about what’s not in them, but at the same time, they became important as material objects. Actually paying for and getting that small summary stack of the records and then looking at these notebooks and looking for something and finding little gems, even if most of it was unusable, made them important in construction the stories.

Originally I expected more of other women’s stories to be like reading, you know, Plath or Gilman or Virginia Woolf. Like I had a huge chapter about Virginia Woolf that was just totally cut. And Woolf is still in the book, just in different ways. In the proposal, the book was more about finding myself through these other  writers that I’ve read. But in the writing process, the autobiography became  so primary and that included those materials, the records and the notebooks.

So the process was a lot of starting and stopping and circling around. I wrote a number of different beginnings to the book. It was almost like I was searching for different ways to begin and different ways to kind of find the center of the story. So I’m sure that comes through in reading. 

For some readers, maybe that is frustrating, but it was a choice I made deliberately. It links to a lot of the books that I love to read, which have more of a sense of opening and searching, as opposed to a strict beginning, middle, and end.

BW: This makes me think about writing as a form of processing your life and experience, but this is something that you really undermine in Committed. Has your relationship to writing changed? What can writing do for us?

SS: My relationship to writing has definitely changed. I was writing so intensely through the loneliest years of my life. And writing was my space to work out ideas and feelings, and it was a comfort and a place to feel like I could write back to everything that I hated about the world that I had to live in. 

But certainly since having a child, my writing has changed. It became more focused.  had a different sense of an audience. But it’s still the best thing in the world for me to write  and have something work, and have that discovery. The creative process, when it works, when I get to something, when it’s going well, that’s still the best thing in the world.

BW: How did you come to write the ending to Committed in this way? You seem to be resisting a narrative of recovery or healing, including a narrative that becoming a mother has given you closure.

SS: We expect closure. We expect recovery. We expect narrative satisfaction. And life doesn’t give you that. So I resisted for a long time. My need to write some sense of recovery was very fraught. And I went back and forth with my editor and my agent for a long time about that. And it was helpful in that it I ultimately forced me to sort of articulate my questions and problems with recovery. 

Being a mother is so important to who I am, but it’s also totally separate from like the seriousness and obsessive quality and sense of myself as a writer, which is everything to me. I don’t reject the fact of being a mother being healing. But I do reject the idea that motherhood is more important than everything else. When I’m writing, when I’m thinking , that is totally consuming and  the most important thing in my life. I just feel like we don’t often allow mothers to have an intellectual life or to let that intellectual life be as important and sometimes it’s shocking to me that we’re still thinking like that in this time. But also when you look you look at the long history of women’s writing, it’s also like, oh, that’s maybe not shocking at all.

BW: Like other memoirs of institutionalization, like Girl, Interrupted, other people in the hospital—other patients, doctors, residents—appear here. How did you think about the responsibility of  writing about other people in this book?

SS: It really was a case by case basis, but when I wrote,  I did not think about it. I wrote without thinking that I have to check in with these people. I’ve always had to write this way. And I can’t say it hasn’t gotten me in trouble. Mt family knew I was writing this book, but I didn’t run it by them. I know some people do. I didn’t do that. I believed that I had to do everything to make the book work, what it needed to be. And that included writing certain stories that people in my life aren’t going to be happy about. I have to live with that now.

I told my family that I had to bring alive who I was in that time. The perspective there, it’s not how I live now. It’s a returning. But I had to recreate that mind space. That felt like a kind of contract that I had with the reader. 

BW: I wanted to ask one last question about the ending. You write about going to see a new doctor, one who is shocked about your experience in the hospital and sort of dismissive. She “can’t imagine” why someone would need to be institutionalized so long, and you wonder if she would have such a failure of imagination if she had read some of the texts you write about: Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Janet Frame, etc. How do you think about the medical field? Do you have any hope?

SS: We’re all fucked, kind of. There’s a much stronger division right now between STEM and humanities. Students are not encouraged to focus on the humanities, on reading and writing and deep study. It’s such a technical grind if you’re interested in medicine. Our educational system is not interested in integrating these two things anymore.

But the doctor in the ending of the book was inexperienced. I don’t fault her. I fault the system. If anything, it reminds me that I was in this place where  a number of these doctors had been trained in the psychoanalytic tradition. And psychoanalysis is, you know, part of the humanities. It’s literary. It’s philosophical. 

I don’t think we acknowledge how much people need the humanities in order to make meaning of being a person, you know, make meaning of being human and living on this earth and trying to connect and go through all these experiences.

It’s a much larger structural problem, but it’s so depressing because I don’t know how I would have survived without being able to take time to just read books and to be in a classroom with professors who had devoted their lives to these ideas.