Committed

On Meaning and Madwomen

De: Suzanne Scanlon

Narrado por: Suzanne Scanlon

Duración: 10 h y 13 m

Resumen del Editor

A raw and masterful memoir about becoming a woman and going mad—and doing both at once.

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 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-actualization are reduced to “crazy chick” and “madwoman” narratives. 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 shaped her.

Transporting, honest, and graceful, 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, Audre Lorde, Shulamith Firestone, and others.

Cover painting: "Morning Sun" (detail), 1952, by Edward Hopper © 2024 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Artothek/Bridgeman Images.

©2024 Suzanne Scanlon (P)2024 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Not since Marguerite Duras have we had such an intimate and moving voice. 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)."—Clancy Martin, author of How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind

"Intimate, unsparing. . . . A chronicle of survival amid mental and familial turmoil. . . . Astute reflections on fragility, healing, and wholeness."—Kirkus Reviews

"Suzanne Scanlon’s memoir Committed is a lyrical and illuminating account of a young woman’s struggle with mental illness and institutionalization. Mining the metaphors endemic to the institutional setting—the way madness or insanity is “a story the patients are told and learn to tell about themselves”—and making use of medical records and her own journals alongside literary depictions and descriptions of treatment, Scanlon questions the cultural conversations around women and mental illness, framing a compelling narrative of her own recovery and redemption."—Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Native Guard and two-time Poet Laureate of the United States