Book Review: “Committed” by Suzanne Scanlon
A Memoir of Madness
It’s hard to write about Suzanne Scanlon’s Committed because it is so brave and raw. It is part memoir and part essay collection (of sorts) about her experience being a patient in a psychiatric ward of a New York City hospital during the 1990s. However, it is also about the literature of madness, and how the author saw herself in writers such as Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Janet Frame among others. It is a book about feminism, too, as the author recounts narratives of female activists who also struggled with the black dogs of mental illness. All this hangs together loosely — it is as though Scanlon took a hammer to the mirror of her life, smashed it into tiny pieces, and then examined these shards mostly out of order. (The book does follow something of a narrative path: meeting her first upon her arrival in a New York City hospital, to her years of being institutionalized, to her tentative steps immersing back into the “real world.” That said, things are not always presented by chronology, but by theme.) Anyone intimate with mental illness is bound to see a piece of themselves in this work. I was struck by how books had girded the author’s descent into and ascent from madness and depression. For me, I look back on the fact that Hamlet in high school taught me what it meant to be mad, and my endless listening to The Cure’s Pornography for what it meant to be seriously depressed and can see a bit of my struggles early in life in the author’s words in how she was affected by books such as The Bell Jar.
As such, while Committed is fascinating and riveting, it is also something of a critic-proof entity. You can’t be critical of this book without being an arse because it is so subjective and personal. Not that I want to criticize the work, as there is very little to criticize, but I would imagine that the only people who would hate this work are those who are narcissistic enough to see mental illness as a problem that needs to “go away” because it is somehow an affront to them. I’m not one of those people. While I might be not so much of a feminist, per se, though I’m all for women’s rights — can men truly be “feminists” without being creepy? I wonder out loud — and while I did find the book’s dovetail into the stories feminist women who were written off as being mentally ill because of their health issues to be a little, smidge, not central to the memoir aspects, I also cannot fault the author for including such sections. Even if they didn’t speak personally to me, it’s still captivating stuff. I spent about five hours on a Canadian holiday reading this book in one sitting because it was that gripping.
As far as the personal narrative goes, it is revealed that Scanlon’s depression appeared to be a result of the death of her mother at a young age. Scanlon’s mom was quickly supplanted by a stepmother who was uncaring towards her — she complained of being left on a mountain during a ski vacation when Scanlon broke her leg on the hill and needed to be transported to a hospital to be set into a cast. By and large, being mentally ill is, for the author, a lonely existence, with her family not being mentioned except when it comes to dealing with her therapy. She does go out on dates with male patients but finds that unfulfilling. (The author would come to realize that she’s bisexual, and I feel that I can mention that without impunity as she outs herself in this book.) I found the sections on childbearing and childrearing to be intriguing as well, as this is a period of the author’s life where she was able to not subsist on antidepressants for fear of harming her baby, either in utero or through breastfeeding. And I was glad to learn of other writers out there who mined the subject of mental illness in their fiction — I’m curious to give Woolf and Frame a try if my TBR list wasn’t a mountain already!
So, getting back to the fact that this book is critic-proof, Committed was, for me, a five-star read despite feeling as though I didn’t want to rain on the author’s parade of being unguarded and revealing. I was amazed at how much personal detail the author was willing to put into the public discourse, and I hope not at the risk of her losing any sort of income-generating stability other than by writing about it. It’s a book, though, that must be handled with kid gloves. After all, Scanlon’s experience is unique and came at a time when, in the United States, letting patients spend years confined to a floor of a hospital was ending in favor of medicating individuals through pharmaceuticals on an outpatient basis. However, anyone with a conscience would be remiss to say anything negative about this experience — especially since mental illnesses aren’t a thing one gets “cured” from. For those who don’t suffer from such illnesses and who want to gain a greater understanding and experience greater empathy for those who do, Committed should be your go-to book. That it seamlessly weaves in the story of the personal as it abuts fictional narratives by other authors may leave the reader in a state of amazement. This book is stunning and powerful, and worth every penny for those who are curious. In short, I found it to be an absorbing and commanding read, and I’m sure you will, too.
Suzanne Scanlon’s Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen was published by Vintage Books on April 16, 2024.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
