Promising Young Women

by Suzanne Scanlon

A series of fragmentary tales tells the story of Lizzie, a young woman who, in her early twenties, unexpectedly embarks on a journey through psychiatric institutions, a journey that will end up lasting many years. With echoes of Sylvia Plath, and against a cultural backdrop that includes Shakespeare, Woody Allen, and Heathers, Suzanne Scanlon's first novel is both a deeply moving account of a life of crisis and a brilliantly original work of art.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Mental Health, Feminism, Literary Fiction, Short Stories, Novels

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 9, 2012

About the author

Suzanne Scanlon is the author of two works of fiction, the critically acclaimed Promising Young Women (Dorothy 2012) and the experimental novel Her 37th Year, An Index (Noemi 2015). Her first work of nonfiction, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, is forthcoming from Vintage and John Murray in the UK. Scanlon has taught at conferences and colleges nationwide; and has been awarded fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ox-Bow Artists Residency, and the Ragdale Foundation. She is the recipient of an MFA from Northwestern University and teaches creative writing at Northwestern and the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Granta, Fence, Harper’s Bazaar, the Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. Her work has been anthologized and translated into many languages. For years, she reviewed theater for Time Out and the Chicago Reader.

Reviews

[Dorotea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know what to do with myself now.

[Parth Jawale · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There is a kind of loneliness that comes from being with people. The kind that is more about a recognition of the failure of communication. The gaps."

Suzanne Scanlon's Promising Young Women is about Lizzie, who keeps going in and out of mental institutions - much like its fragmented narrative which keeps folding and unfolding into itself. The prose has this innate ability to make sense of itself by referencing and re-referencing events, memories and changing perceptions. It's almost unbelievable that such writing is planned, and I believe it is.

"She didn't look like she was at peace, but seemed to instead reference peace. What peace might look like."

The prose moves through time freely and drops multiple clues for you to understand the period it corresponds to, and it works beautifully in its favour. For example, a chapter named "Heather" starts off with an elaborate reference to the movie Heathers and its release a few years prior to the current time in the novel. Her writing is very clever and at times too cathartic to keep reading at a stretch. At the same time, it's addictive and you just can't help but finish it in one reading.

"If you were the one who didn't know how to live, if you needed to be taught, we'd look away, too. We wouldn't want to know."

[Samuel · Rating 5 out of 5]

“They were always watching Friends. Friends made everything so much worse. She had always hated Friends, which evoked in her an excruciating sense of her aloneness.“

As someone who doesn’t have a core friend group, I felt this in my soul. I loved friends as a kid but hated the show as I got older lmao rip Matthew Perry tho!

This was such a breeze of a read, I really enjoyed this book. I’m new to the Dorthy Editions wave but I am hooked.

[cass krug · Rating 4 out of 5]

picked this up after devouring suzanne scanlon’s memoir last spring. this is a very fragmentary fictionalized account of the events of her memoir: scanlon’s time in and out of psychiatric institutions. we get glimpses of her childhood when her mother passed away, her college years, the narrator’s own experience with motherhood, as well as the lives of the other women in the ward. timelines are not always clear, but the emotions conveyed are.

while i think committed is the stronger book overall, promising young women is a quick and engaging read. you can really see how its publication in 2012 laid the groundwork for her memoir to be published in 2024. i was particularly touched by “the closest thing” which recounts the narrator’s mother’s funeral.

really excited to continue on with her 37th year, an index and to see what scanlon publishes in the future! i find myself really moved by her story and the way she works through her experiences on the page.

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Iatrogenic" is when the treatment does harm. Untrustworthy medicine, misunderstood brains: when you experience the personal and expanded import of this, it must be like being eaten by The Blob. What is moral courage? To express compassion after having been digested by the invalidating maw of medical-industrial phagocytosis: "It was far away, and it had nothing to do with me. Still, I couldn't stop thinking about it. What it would be like." (23) To still read faces, and describe what people are feeling.

To be on guard but to still speak. To let down the necessary guard enough. This is writing with a terse, well-guided economy, where poetry is = avoiding mundane diction fluff, but at the same time, convincing the reader that what the speaker is saying is important, no matter what it is. When the speaker plants the seed that "Language is a betrayal, after all," (31) and then, of course, continues speaking, words become mines. "She would deploy the facts." (39) The reader walks on words the speaker dislikes, and there are small, necessary explosions. They prune away directions not to follow, the make decisions about what we are saying and how it is hurting us. To know words are untrustworthy, and then, as if this wasn't enough, to start to lose them, and still speak.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I heard about this book on Sarah McCarry's blog The Rejectionist and, after seeing in the description on Goodreads that it's reminiscent of Plath, decided to read it: it was short and I had loved The Bell Jar. The book was almost too disjointed for me, with the chronology jumping all over the place so that I didn't really know what was happening when; each chapter (including a not-related but perfectly-written one called Girls with Problems) was a new story.

But the book is definitely worth reading, and this is why: it has lines like these:

"There was a day early on, before it got really bad--that feeling--I didn't know what to call it, because it wouldn't fit into words--which had me desiring a certain obliteration ... that made me want to stop eating, or to smoke lots of cigarettes, or to run, or to put on bright red lipstick and walk down the street until someone would touch me."

and "Everything Dread said was like a secret voice speaking out of my own bones."

and "'You look so pretty,' one or another said. This is what people say to little girls. This is not the only way we learn that pretty matters, but it is one way."

Promising Young Women is full of those sorts of sentences, the ones that are quietly true. It was a little too fragmented--but worth it.

[mer · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Or maybe it would be better to die than to feel that thing that was more than loss or emptiness or need. It was death itself. In life."

This is a short hazy novel and Suzanne writes depression with such raw clarity that i really appreciate but this did really leave me wanting more

[Cassie (book__gal) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You feel alone. Is a young woman’s loneliness a cliche or does it stand for the world? You once thought your loneliness was special in its intensity. It’s possible that everyone thinks her loneliness is special. It all makes you sick. A desire to puke. This remaining defining feeling in your now post-inpatient life. You’ve been cured. That thing so heavy and intractable that you believe it may swallow you whole. Soon. It isn’t so much the feeling itself that is nauseating rather the sense that it will not cease. That it will expand. As it expands, endurance becomes less likely. And then there is the knowledge that enduring was possibly the worst option."⁣
⁣
I read Promising Young Women in one sitting yesterday. I loved it. The young white woman in perpetual existential crisis trope can be played out, I know, but the fragmented narrative and cathartic voice of this book felt unique and moving to me. I don’t think this book will be for everyone, but I think you’ll find it voices feelings many of us have felt but didn’t quite know how to put into words. I also greatly enjoy reading about the experiences of young women in general. Knowing the reading tastes and preferences of some of my Goodreads friends here and on Instagram, I think quite a few of you will enjoy it and if it speaks to you I implore you to pick it up 🖤

[Laryssa Wirstiuk · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book had a few brilliant shining moments, but overall I found the narrative to be forgettable. The fragmented episodes, in my opinion just did not work for this book, and I would have like to see some more substantial character development. I just don't feel connected to the characters at all and therefore cannot invest my emotions in them. The ending was particularly underwhelming. Also, I think the book trivializes mental illness. I kind of get that the author is trying to make a point about regular growing pains and grief being characterized as mental illness, but in doing so it seemed to me to be making a statement about all mental illness - that psychiatric drugs are just all good fun. I don't know if that's what the author meant to portray, but it came across that way. I just kept looking for something to grasp. I would not recommend.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I saw the charts that noted what made a patient more or less likely to succeed. I read about the 'unexpected failures.' According to the book the 'unexpected failures' were those attractive, intelligent, promising young women who had, against all expectation, offed themselves in the years post-discharge.

I knew I shouldn't be reading but I couldn't stop. I read for clues to my own prognosis. It didn't look good."

As this memoir-like novel begins, a narrator named Lizzie is recalling he time in her late teens she spent institutionalized for depression. She tells her story in a hypnotic, highly stylized manner she seems to have borrowed, along with a few memorable lines of description, from The Bell Jar. Unlike The Bell Jar, though, this novel's perspective eventually opens up, so that we see its protagonist and the people in her world from both inside and out. There is much more to the story than initially meets the eye.

Though Lizzie's hospitalization is set in the '90s, Scanlon evokes a disconcerting sense of timelessness, as though what happened to this "promising" woman has happened and is still happening somewhere right now. Scanlon weaves pastiche and cultural references about woman and madness into a vivid, expertly crafted novel that is almost impossible to put down.

[lizard · Rating 4 out of 5]

”You will come to hate it, to find this habit of yours grotesque: that you expect them to be something else. How your head fills up. Those prosy dreams.”

just another affirmation that I’ve never had a unique thought or experience in my life ✨

[edgar orellana · Rating 4 out of 5]

the authors voice is insane in this book. she really pricked apart this character of Lizzie and lets the reader see through every facet. it was like beautifully discordant. however this also made it complex to wrap my head around and would’ve liked a summary. all in all tho, lovely book

[nursé · Rating 5 out of 5]

very close to home

[Cofi · Rating 4 out of 5]

sad girl books truly hit different

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dorothy Publishing delivers again! This time, the story centers around Lizzie, a woman who goes in and out of mental institutions. The structure is not linear, and gives voice to some feelings that I think most women experience at some point.

[Maddie · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who used to be a “career patient” at psych hospitals (but has since, miraculously, recovered), this book put an ache in my chest. Books can be so powerful.

Gonna be thinking about this one for a while 💗

[J.S.A. Lowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh HELL yes. I have a lot to say, but I'm reviewing it and another book for an Unnamed Journal, so nothing more from me for now, not a word. Only: you want this. Trust me, you do.

[Furciferous Quaintrelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well that was a total waste of time.

I don't know why the author or her editors or her agent or anyone responsible for putting this book out into the world, thought that these discordant, trifling, rambles added up to anything even approaching a finished manuscript; but here we are.

I'm guessing that because Scanlon is some kind of artistic type, that she saw the logic in trying to reflect her meandering thoughts, random recollections and scattershot revelations in such a way as to somehow represent the broken mind of someone who ended up in on a psych ward. She probably thought it was clever and spoke to the inner turmoil of troubled young women. Personally, I think it was indulgent and ineffectual.

I felt nothing for the main character other than annoyance. Scanlon wasted my time with these pseudo-vignettes, never quite telling us enough to truly engender any sense of sympathy, for what may well have been a difficult time for Lizzie...but in reality just came off as childish posturing. She didn't even have her try to kill herself in any meaningful way. All we are treated to is yet another character, displaying the boringly typical anhedonia that every wannabe artistic type seems to feel makes them appear deep, interesting and worthy of examination by everyone else who comes into contact with them. Lizzie does not appear interesting or worthy of examination; by extension, Scanlon also does not appear to be a very interesting writer whose creations are worthy of examination.

Lizzie had a parent die when she was young? Big deal, join the club. Building an entire identity around the romanticised notion that she is some kind of 21st century Virginia Woolf (another irritatingly self-absorbed broad who at least had the good sense to fill her pockets full of stones), all big eyes and hauntingly attractive facial features. Meh. I have very little empathy for those who float through life, using their perpetual grief (be it truly observed or not) to give them an identity. They enjoy the lack of responsibility or maturity that is bestowed upon them by extended periods of time in psychiatric facilities. There they can wallow in their arrested development, whilst other adults rally around them, taking care of their every need, making them feel special.

The character of Lizzie is not special. Nor is she interesting. Scanlon's inharmonious prose feels like a high-school senior trying to show off the different ways of constructing a chapter, with the result being a jarring mess of twatwaffle that was mercifully short enough to finish pretty quickly. If all art is at some level autobiographical, this book leads me to believe that the author is nowhere near as smart as she would like to think she is, despite however many ass-pats she will have undoubtedly have received from other pretentious bores who hover around literary circles, hoping to have their own drivel given sufficient praise to see themselves through those dark, lonely evenings when they realise they don't actually have very much to say - despite desperately wanting to have someone to say all of that nothingness to.

Laughably sophomoric, the entire thing reads like a collection of exercises in attempting to copy various different styles of writing; the kind of thing that ought to have stayed in the scruffy composition book that was never meant to be shown to anyone other than their English professor or their best friend. It's tiring to wade through (and please don't tell me that I'm supposed to be feeling that way, because that's the point, y'know, to like, totally get into the head of this misunderstood female character...I'm too old and too over this BS to be gaslit into thinking I'm simply not smart enough to "get" the way this garbage is supposed to be read) which really only makes me feel sympathy for said English professors, who likely need copious amounts of gin to have to read crap like this every single year, from every single "promising young woman" who attends their lectures.

I'm awarding this 2 stars purely because there were a couple of sentences that had me smile or smirk or at least not want to end my own life there and then. I thoroughly disliked this mediocre offering and don't think I'll be picking up anything else by Scanlon ever again.

[maggs · Rating 3 out of 5]

If “promising” would be the word to describe this book when you try to read it, it’s not the book for you.

Promising Young Women talks about Lizzie, who shares her story through the several mental institutions she stays and the women she meets there. Through the 160 pages of the book, you see Lizzie and the way grief takes hold of her entire life, despite she tries to overcome it, she can’t get past it.

This book had so much potential and was thrown away to find a way on experimenting (what i prefer to call it) on different types of point of view. These changes through the book seem like a simile between what Lizzie felt over the course of her journey, but it came out at the end as sloppy and with all its potential thrown out the window. We have several stories from the other patients and what Lizzie could gather from them but most lacked depth and it felt like a way of trying to justify the name of the book. But not everything is relied on it, we have an accurate representation on how the mental institutions work/don’t work with several patients due to lack of interest. You see Lizzie trying to get better. Be listened to, scream for help and everywhere she goes, no one actually cares about it.

There is a scene where Lizzie goes to the library on the ward. She mentions:

“I saw the charts that noted what made a patient more or less likely to succeed. I read about the ‘unexpected failures.’
According to the book the ‘unexpected failures’ were those attractive, intelligent, promising young women who had, against all expectation, offed themselves in the years post-discharge.”

And later, Lizzie proceeds to tell us how the “pretty girls” are the ones who get almost “real” help because they can adapt back to society without society breaking them back into a facility.

During the telling of the events, we lack cohesion, not just from how it jumps from side to side of the timeline; but some topics just become gratuitous and thrown to the story for a reaction of the reader. To try and get our attention back and link to a feeling Lizzie may be feeling during the scene.

It left me on this state of high and dry. It has a tendency to give you a good push to the plot and keeps you on the top and then it takes it away by changing the point of view and telling something that has no correlation, whatsoever. I would recommend it for text analysis use, because it kept me hooked on how it would change again.

[bldstaindblnd · Rating 3 out of 5]

the first half of the book was "promising" but i struggled to get through the rest of it; that's why i would give it 2,5 stars but i can't so it gets three and that's only because it was objectively short and i'm feeling generous rn. the fucked up continuity didn't work in this one simply because i didn't care enough to take the time needed to figure out what's going on i just kept reading in hopes i'll finish it as fast as possible; unfortunately i'm not into whatever this slam poetry inspired prose is. i cared about one (1) character in this book she served cunt for 3 pages and then she died and i immediately stopped caring. either way with this book i'm ending my obsession with miserable white women and that's one small act of selfcare that i hope will change my life for the better x

[n a b ! l a · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Why do you wear black all the time?"
"I’m in mourning for my life."

[Jordan Steyer · Rating 3 out of 5]

a fictionalized version of her stay in a mental institution, i’m glad she gets to write her actual story in a few years (Committed, 2024)

[🐈‍⬛ · Rating 2 out of 5]

A FRACTURED REVIEW OF A FRACTURED BOOK

ENG 401

Ever since I heard the teacher say the students had to read this list of books, I wanted to die. I wrote this in a post. I wrote a lot of posts back then. Some of them I even published. I wrote them in my phone. It was all sort of satisfying.

This happened in the fall. That I wound up in an English class. I guess it had to be the fall. I remember the oppressive themes. You know the themes. Those that subtly call you a bad person. Those that call your country bad. Those that say you couldn't possibly understand.

I had frustration no one could confuse with satisfaction. A splash of consternation and downright perturbation.

I wasn't supposed to write or I was but the class wanted to read what I wrote. But it wasn't supposed to be like this. 

We were taught MLA format. I loved MLA format. I loved all formats. I still do. I found comfort there: holding the phone, typing the words, filing the screen with words.

(WHAT'S YOUR DAMAGE,) HEATHER

This wasn't like the movie Heathers. Heathers had humor. This book made me want to stick my head in an oven. Sylvia Plath is not a joke.

Feminism. Feminism. Feminism.

RANDOM THOUGHTS

She sat in blue pajamas. She longed to say,

"Your mother is not a fish. What are you talking about?"

She would deploy the facts.

MISERY

I guess I could be kind of a Drama Queen, though I rarely admitted it. 'The student has an obsessive need to complain over and over again.'

MOR

Roger was a twat who quoted Russian. Roger was a creep. Roger liked to be surrounded by pretty girls. Roger must be stopped. 

UGH

I can appreciate a sassy acronym.

ASPIRING

"Bright sadness" is exactly how I would describe Los Angeles. 

ELEANOR GRADY

...was quite a lady, according to the ward.

MARY

She thinks of Bill Clinton as attractive. This is disturbing. Possibly one of the most disturbing parts.

MOUNT ST. HELENS

Toads love ash. Who knew? 🌋 🐸

THE CLOSEST THING

The best description of Limousines

CONSTANT OBSERVATION

All emotions are problems. Yet the book makes you feel things. Is that a problem? 

DREAMS OF RETURN

That Madeline, always doing things with acronyms. I can appreciate a strange dream. 

ALL THAT YOU AREN'T BUT MIGHT POSSIBLY BE

Everyone is privileged compared to those who endured concentration camps.

She speaks of loneliness. Reading is done alone. Is that lonely? 

AM I BLUE (IN THE FACE)?

There are things I love, and here are a few:

Books, chocolate, history, travel, tea, macarôns, France, dark red roses, anything to do with WWII, the work of David Foster Wallace, and inappropriate humor

[Shelley · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not sure what I just read! Ok, I do, but I felt it was one big mess. The story was disjointed. It was frustrating as I'd never know where it was going even when I was reading it, because it was like being in a brain of a person messed up on drugs or something. I wanted to tear my eye balls out of my head.

In telling her story, Lizzi is all over the place, just random: Stories of her upbringing, being in the many psy wards over the years, the patients of the present one, authors and books she's read, her mother dying of cancer, when she was in UCLA, her relationship with her parents when they are alive and when they are dead, the guy she lived with but didn't sleep with, sessions with her present shrink, the baby she had (and what I felt like came out of nowhere!) and very little mention of it (what became of the baby?), sessions of group therapy and her fellow patients, the former patients who left and who ended up committing suicide, singers, actors.....all this and more in no random order just as I have done so explaining it in this paragraph.

So when I came across the chapter almost half way through and it's called, "UGH", I thought, that's how I feel trying to read this book. It turns out it means: UNDERSTANDING, GROWTH, HEALING. I didn't caps it on purpose, that's how it is in the book, so I'm not screaming at anyone. It was a group therapy exercise.

I just wanted to finish it. Thank goodness it's only 156 pages.

As for the ending, boring and dull. It was a paragraph that I would normally skip over because it's a list of what I would feel adds nothing to the story or nothing that would care about. I couldn't believe it was to end like so. Ugh! Here it is:

"There are things I love, and I think of these as I sleep. When I first met Dread, back in LA, we told each other our favorite things. My list included: blue hyacinths, Judy Garland's voice, red Charms Blow Pops, Gertrude Stein, Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch, the plays of Christopher Durang, the poetry of Audre Lorde, and blue mascara. Dread loved Woody Allen movies, Diamanda Galas, truffle oil, Sandra Bernhard's Without You I"m Nothing, wearing black, Paul Auster's novels, Chanterelle, and macaroons.''

This book got 3.94 on goodreads. I know I've missed the meaning of the way it was written altogether. Ugh.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is beautifully written in a matter-of-fact tone about mental illness. It is a coming of age novel that take the main character Lizzie through her struggles with various stages of life--sexuality, career, and motherhood--at the same time she is struggling with mental illness.

Subjects like mental instability are very challenging to write about because they are so easily overdramatized. The last thing a thoughtful audience wants are histronics. The sensitive, smart choices Scanlon makes in her writing--indeed there is also a lovely ironic humor--make Promising Young Women an enjoyable, insightful read that rewards you every step of the way.

[Jen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some really lovely stuff in here. I didn't think the structure of the book -- these fragments in chapters -- was used to its fullest potential. It feels almost as though the book could have gone a bit deeper into the editing process, made the fragments seem more intentional, less haphazardly collected together.

The chapter toward the end of the book called "The Other Story" was incredibly moving and well-written/structured and works really well as a standalone piece.

[Crystal · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fragmentary mental health novel is exactly my brand and this did not disappoint. It helps, too, to no longer be looking at it in the furor of my teens and 20s though still not 'well' either.

I disagree about the types of self-harmers. I wasn't a Copycat or Drama Queen but not sure if I agree I was a Destroyer by default, just very focused, very self-contained, very IDGAF about your contracts for safety and rules.

[Julie · Rating 3 out of 5]

A disturbing, disjointed ride through one woman's survival of depression. I did not like the choice to make the last thing her suicide attempt that got her institutionalized. I would have liked more on how she coped and learned to deal with life.

[Jasmine Woodson]

oh thank goodness I was afraid messy but promising tragic young white women narratives had been played allll the way out, but nope!

I LOVE the structure of the stories, though, how the narrative folds into and out of itself.

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was what Prozac Diaries should have been but wasn't. Little vignettes on the psych ward, all of them well-written and pungent. And she made it out and wrote this book, so they're extra-good and extra-pungent.