Committed

A Memoir of Finding Meaning in Madness

By: Suzanne Scanlon

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Paperback | 13 May 2025 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
368 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.9 x 13.0 x 2.2

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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.

About the Author

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.

Industry Reviews

Intimate and moving . . . Among the very finest and most intelligent memoirs ever written - and with such generosity towards those who suffer mental pain (which is, all of us)

Insightful, brave and fiercely compelling . . . Beautifully written and passionate in exploring lost connections, especially between mothers and daughters

An intimate and deeply intelligent, soulful book that articulates the struggle to connect to the world

An immensely talented writer, at her finest, cutting through propriety and convention to reach what is essential, meaningful, real. This book lives alongside the works of Annie Ernaux, Elena Ferrante, and James Baldwin, and feels every bit as important

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