Madwomen and meaning in the mental hopsital
Suzanne Scanlon's psychiatric ward memoir "COMMITTED: On Meaning and Madwomen" ruminates on more than her time spent in the hospital
There’s nothing ordinary or straightforward about Suzanne Scanlon’s memoir Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen.
It couldn’t be because our minds and our memory don’t work in that way. Nothing in life is straightforward. In fact, attempting suicide as a college student is as far from the straight path as anyone can take. It’s off the path and into the woods with no way out, usually. For Scanlon, she wandered off the path and ended up at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in New York City, where she stayed for three years, getting worse under the guidance of the system and its roadblocks stopping her from reaching outside the hospital walls until one day Scanlon and her fellow inmates were set free.
Scanlon doesn’t approach the mental health memoir in a traditional narrative. Instead, she unfurls her story through poetic layers and an examination of the tradition of madwomen in literature. She reaches back in time to her childhood and the death of her mother when she was seven-year-old and extends the story to the future where she is a mother herself trying to navigate the fraught life of a parent. It’s a wide range that finds its center in the hospital. To do this, Scanlon uncovers her medical records to help recreate her sessions with doctors. In those moments, she can now see how little help the system offered. Instead, it pushed her further away from the real world and deeper in herself. Getting out and getting better never felt like the end goal. Those three years melt into one dilemma after another, each new doctor looking for new answers, new places to put the blame and new medication. But what Scanlon does find is that her story fits into a pattern that writers like Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Audre Lorde have all written about — or even experienced themselves — and through that discovery she can make sense of how and why she ended up where she did and got stuck there.
What Scanlon pulls off is a remarkable feat. Committed blends genres and never rests. Instead of settling on the first layer of answers, or even putting blame on any specific person, Scanlon reaches deep into her records and memory for some answers. She juxtaposes science alongside art to see the parallel lines between her story and others. She has conversations with writers like Lorde and Woolf. In the end, it pays off because her memoir fills in the holes and hits higher notes thanks to her task of placing her story inside of something greater than.
Scanlon is the author of the novels Promising Young Women and Her 37th Year, An Index.
This interview was edited for clarity and length.
How did this book take shape? It is a different shape than I think a lot of people would expect?
I guess the typical mainstream memoir, yes, has a very different shape. I just read Meg Kissinger's memoir, While You Were Out, about her kind of family mental illness, and she's a journalist, and I think the background of a journalist is different. So I'm very inspired.
I read widely — poetry and creative nonfiction and lyric essays and so on, as well as fiction — so I imagine I kind of formatted it to have different movements, I suppose. I think, originally, I had been writing these short essays that were sort of merging my experience through writing about film. I had an essay where I was really engaging with Fanny and Alexander as well as Tammy Wynette, who was one of my mom's favorite singers. In that essay, I think I was also writing about Angels in America. I had this memory of seeing that with my dad when I was in the hospital on a break. So all of the different kind of cultural experiences, mostly film, and that's really where I started and I think that's what I had my agent read, who was at the time a new agent I was working with, and she sort of saw a longer project. So we put together a proposal and it set out the story, the autobiographical story, and then the different writers I would engage with.
Then, when I started writing, the proposal sort of didn't matter anymore.
I had to start writing from nowhere. Early on, I needed to start with story and that's why it starts with that walk and that return because I was setting up sort of who I am now, this narrator in the present who's returning to this past story. I couldn't do that without the layers of being a reader and writer and teacher. So I've come to really deeply engage with all of these writers that come up and they've definitely helped me, even if I haven't been deliberate or conscious of it. They've given me ways to sort of construct the story of my past that I wasn't able to at the time because I was living in it — living in this sort of the trauma of my mom's early death.
Then this hospitalization became almost inseparable from the suffering that brought me in there because the treatment plan became problematic. It was hard to separate those out. I feel like I've spent the rest of my life sort of writing about that, but it is always changing, from who I am now, having this distance, it seemed to suggest a new form. This is something I discovered while writing from scratch, even after all of those beginning pieces. I realized there were so many questions I needed to answer in many different ways. That's part of the density. I think it's this resistance to a simple reductive story.
Well, I think what's interesting I find is a lot of people rush to write their memoir about something traumatic that happens to them, but that distance allows you to be more analytical, which this book is analytical of yourself and also of the treatment you're getting. I think it allows everyone to have a fair place in it as opposed to, this happened to me, I feel bad for me there. You don't want me to pity you.
Toni Morrison had this line about don't publish anything until you're 40, at least, but I do feel like I had and I didn't publish my first book until I was probably 40, but not on purpose. I wanted to publish before, as my students do, but I do think I couldn't have written this in my 30s. I was too close to the experience. It's about aging as much as anything I think.
How did parenting play a role in writing this?
It's huge because it changed my orientation and perspective on life: raising a child and seeing the vulnerability. As I'm writing an essay more focused right now about how it was and has been to raise a child, especially through those years when I experienced my mother's illness and death and then the aftermath of that and as a parent where I need to be present with my son. At the same time, so often returning to that sense of, oh, this is who I was, This was developmentally who I was — this vulnerability and this need for a mother was as alive in me at that age as it was in him. Of course, as a child going through it, I could not have known that, right? I didn't have the distance and I had at such a defense at that age, which is understandable. Part of parenting allowed me to peel back that and add a new understanding to what it meant to be a child and what my loss actually meant and what the neglect really was.
At the end, do you feel you reached the intention that was initially set out for you, or did it change as you finished?
Certainly, it led to discovery. What changed was going in aware of the very problematic treatment, which I am still very disturbed by it, and I am very aware that it caused a lot of problems after the fact. I had to sort of recover from the treatment itself, and it's still something inside of me.
However, as I wrote, this question arose of how it also helped me, or what it gave me that is significant. And it's not one thing, right? Even losing my mom, I would never go back and say, yeah, let's do that again in this life. At some point I had to see the gift is who I became out of that loss.
I think for the hospitalization, it was the same impulse to see that there were some things that it gave me — and certainly time to read and write and be alone with the kind of safety and protection of this sense of being cared for. I suppose, in some way, that I wasn't able to internalize myself at that point. I felt quite out of control and I think that that certainly didn't feel satisfying at the time — the reading and the writing. But, I think in the long run, it certainly was something of a gift to be able to stop time. Stopping time is impossible, but that's what I was trying to do, I think, on some level. So I did get something out of it that many people don't get and there are aspects of it that many people would like, even if they don't want that setting. Nobody wants to be in a mental hospital, but there are things about it. I mean, it can be helpful for many people too. I just don't want to, I didn't want anything to be one thing. That's what I would discover as I wrote.
There's no villain, which I found interesting. I finally read One Flew Over Cuckoo's Nest a couple of years ago, and I was like, wow, it is that simple: there's a villain. Nurse Ratcheted is a villain. Whereas you don't give the reader that and I was wondering if you were thinking about that as you were writing? You said you didn't want to do that, but were you thinking, “how can I keep a reader interested in this if I don't have that thing that they're looking for or expect?”
I certainly tried to tell a story. I included many scenes throughout that were kind of written in some ways using the tools of fiction and scenes, and so in that way, I was stepping back and writing the scenes in terms of my memory. Some of those scenes, there's not a villain, but it's really bad behavior. It's not best practices to tell a patient immediately that her name is ridiculous, or to tell her she thinks she's special or to kind of overmedicate and in this sort of random way, or to have this pharmaceutical company there influencing the treatment, especially without telling the patients that. So there was plenty of not villains, but I wanted those scenes to be there because I also didn't want to romanticize this. I mean, it was really a very problematic treatment.
The villain may be just kind of the larger paradigm of sickness and not about sort of allowing this regression into sick as opposed to really helping somebody. I can see how it's obviously useful in some contexts, but I think now the idea is not about identifying so completely as sick as much as understanding these are things you have to learn to live with and how do you do that and how do you cope and how do you get help when you need it again? This is kind of part of a larger life context. I think that was the problem there and that ideology behind it.
The treatment was a villain, if I could say.
With working on nonfiction as opposed to fiction, which you’ve written in the past, I was wondering if you felt the restrictions — because you couldn’t make anything up — also freed you because you had figure out a way to make these scenes stand and work within within your analytical process.
It was fun because in some ways I thought I would prefer making things up, but this is the material of my life of my autobiography, so working with it from this distance, the constraint allowed me to use it without feeling attached to it, which in many of these cases I needed to bring it alive for the reader, but I don't feel that attached to the experience.
For example, entering the hospital it was fun to have to enter those walls again and that's why I'm often thinking of the structure—a box or different rooms I had to go into
I found I was worried after writing the proposal because the proposal set up a lot of constraints, and so I felt like when I started writing it would be forced and dry. I had to work in that and there were all sorts of discoveries about if I hadn’t had that constraint.
The constraint was: this story took place over just a number of years. It was the core story. It was like four years perhaps, and three. But with that constraint, I realized, oh, there's so many places I can go because I'm grounded in that story. I could go to these places as rooms—my mother's room or the room of the hospital—and it was okay because it had that grounding in this story I had to write. In the same way it allowed me to understand the story that I thought I understood. Now that was part of the discovery, like, oh no, you didn't get it at all. Now you're older and now you can see the ways we need to tell ourselves stories. For a long time I needed to tell myself, you're seeing the villain here, or the complete failure of this treatment, or my complete victimhood and whatever it was, and now I could see those as different narratives.
That was quite exciting in the process.
It seems as though you're discovering a lot of this too. The book doesn't read like somebody that knows all the answers. In fact, it reads like somebody that is searching for the answers, which is important.
That's my favorite kind of work to read. And that's what I tell students all the time: If you go in knowing this is my thesis, and you're just reading and writing to prove it, the writing's dead. You have to allow yourself to be challenged and complicated and surprised and make discoveries.
You can find the answer later and edit it and fix it. That's the beauty of revision.
Of course. And it's also this vulnerability. My favorite writers are willing to go to this edge of something and to force themselves to stay there in that space. You can tell reading memoirs when the writer is not willing to go to those spaces that are necessary to the book.
I had early readers who were like, “the reader has a big question about this and you're not going there and they can see that you're not going there.” And that was very much, for me, the space in between my mother's death and the hospitalization, because those years are more complicated and they involve my family who are all alive and I love them and they're supportive in my life. That was a place I was avoiding, but the book didn't work. I'm not willing to avoid that. I can't stand it when books do that. I love the writers like Maggie Nelson who go so far that there's this sort of sense of wonder at a kind of thrill of performance. I find Sigrid Nunez, in her fiction, willing to do that.
It's a vulnerability that I love in writers.