Committed: A Memoir of Finding Meaning in Madness

by Suzanne Scanlon

'A deep, sometimes harrowing book about loss, grief, and the way literary representations of mental illness shaped Scanlon's experience of her own life' Emily Gould, The Cut

'Visceral, raw and tender, this candid and timely memoir is, at heart, a love-letter to the profound and redemptive power of literature' Annabel Abbs

'An immensely talented writer, at her finest, cutting through propriety and convention to reach what is essential, meaningful, real' Amina Cain

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 a long tradition of women whose complicated and compromised stories of self-discovery are reduced to 'madwoman' narratives.

Transporting, honest, and unflinching, Suzanne recounts her story alongside her reading of writers from the 'madwoman canon' - including Audre Lorde, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath and radical feminist Shulamith Firestone. The result is a profoundly moving journey through madness, from breakdown to breakthrough, and a revelatory exploration of being a woman and being mad - and how interwoven those experiences can be.

Audible Audio

Published April 25, 2024

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.