Committed: A Meditation on Grief, Madness, and Meaning

"When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother-feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain-she made a suicide attempt at twenty years old that landed her in the New York State Psychiatric Institute. After nearly four 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. She began to see herself as part of a long tradition of women whose stories are reduced to "crazy chick" narratives, rather than stories of women who forged complicated and compromised stories of self-actualization: Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances Farmer, Jean Seberg, Sylvia Plath, Shulamith Firestone. It was a thrilling discovery, and she searched for more books, more woman writers, as the journey of her life converged with her journey through the literature that shapes and ultimately saves her. Committed is Suzanne's story about discovery and recovery, reclaiming the idea of the "madwoman" as one template for insight and transcendence. Committed ducks and weaves through the works of these seminal madwomen via Suzanne's own story of resilience and being. She paints vivid portraits of friends and lovers, life on the ward and after, and the women who saved her life by encouraging her to live it"--