The inextricable link between reading, writing, and madness
A review of one of my recent faves—Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen by Suzanne Scanlon
“I was supposed to be having the time of my life.” —The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Virginia Woolf with a room of her own, yet pockets full of stones. Sylvia Plath thinly veiled as Esther Greenwood. Elizabeth Wurtzel, president of Prozac Nation. Winona Ryder’s portrayal in Girl, Interrupted. Even Peyton “People Always Leave” Sawyer from One Tree Hill.
Throughout modern media, there’s been a confounding fascination with madness, and the women afflicted with it. I wondered… why?
Well, these women are complex and complicated. Heightened and extreme. Qualities that make for enrapturing stories.
They turn the inside, out: they wrap the inner psychological self into words made for public consumption, made for us to attempt to understand.
They’re often connected to creativity—the act of creating art a source of both fulfillment and torture. This art often bearing the weight of their desire to be understood.
“The fear of incomprehensibility links madness and writing.”
— Hermione Lee in her biography of Virginia Woolf
Really, there is an inextricable link between reading, writing, and madness.
And this link is exactly what “Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen” by Suzanne Scanlon explores.
I initially came across this book on the staff recommendation shelf at McNally Jackson: “This one is for the Readers, those with Bad Brains, and anyone who just wants to read a bunch of really good sentences,” it said.
Sold, I said.
Here’s the publisher’s description:
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 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.
And literature shaped her indeed.
Growing up a young woman in the world, in the wake of her mother’s death and on the pursuit of finding herself, from a household that avoided emotions entirely and with a brain that she suspected pretty early on wasn’t “normal”, the author devoured books like The Bell Jar and The Lover.
In that year before I moved to the city, my relationship with books had changed. Now I read books in a way that felt at once desperate and thrilling. It had become a way to live, or a search for how to live. I suppose it is easy to dismiss a young woman for forming and shaping her identity under the influence of books, or reading—and yet. This was what I had and it was everything.
In these stories of madness, she saw her own staring back. She saw—as so many readers do, but perhaps her with more desperation and urgency as she describes—that books could be windows into other people’s minds, and thus, mirrors too.
They can give “the electric intensity of recognition”.
I mean, what a phrase.
It’s as if reading made her recognize her mental illness, and liberated her from it too.
I am trying to say something about that sacred relationship between a young woman and a book. I am speaking of my own experience back then, as I moved further from life, untethered, lost, in search of some sustaining framework.
As a sentiment, it too easily becomes saccharine—a book saved me! That is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the reception that is possible when the reader is open, as I was, in need of the voice, of possibility. Reading became a way to actively rewrite my life.
In college during the 90s, she found herself in a mental hospital—”in the official records, the word is stayed, not lived. I stayed in a hospital. It wasn’t about living.”
The book wanders from explaining more visceral moments of that experience, to more macro observations about the reputation, the history, the industry of “madness”. She reports on it and she’s lived it—the author and the subject.
Madness as a term or madwoman as a title feel pretty archaic now. A crude, incomplete way to describe someone suffering with their mental health. A sexist one too.
One’s mental health is, of course, affected both by how you’re wired and what’s happened to you, nature and nature. A case of “madness” is as unique as the individual themselves.
And before we had Sylvia or Elizabeth or Suzanne to speak for themselves, an even cruder diagnosis spoke for them.
“Hysteria”, dating back to ancient times, was the term used to describe essentially any psychological or physical symptom experienced by women, attributed to a “wandering womb”1. Literally from the beginning of time, rather than attempting to understand the woman, she was dubbed “hysterical” and shipped off to an asylum.
For centuries, this word was used to blanket, genericize, pathologize, dismiss the experiences of women.
Scanlon’s book, its predecessors, the ones she outlines within her pages do the opposite.
They individualize and contextualize. They make tangible and real another human’s experience. Something she found as essential as air earlier in her life.
Essential because of the feeling of isolation that lives at the heart of mental illness—”so far out”, as she says.
Woolf understood both the protective quality—a numbing of feeling—and the great danger of madness: to be so far out with no way back, and to lose all means of communicating that gap. A famous poem by Woolf’s lesser known contemporary, British poet Stevie Smith, comes to mind: I was much further out than you thought / and not waving by drowning.
How often has a doctor—or a friend—diagnosed a person as waving, when she is indeed drowning?
She argues books can, if not save you from drowning, bring you closer to waving. They did for her.
They make an isolating experience a (slightly more) collective one. Knowing there are others out there feeling a semblance of what you’re feeling, becomes strength in numbers, which can become real strength.
Nothing about mental health is simple. But to me, the fascination comes down to this: everyone wants to be seen and understood.
Scanlon’s book is beautifully and intensely open and honest about wanting to be seen. Through striking and delicate words, she endeavors to be understood.
Whether the reader has the same “affliction” or not, seeing other humans deeply and complexly is what reading—life—is all about.
To pain and loneliness, fear and isolation, reading can be an antidote.
And also, this book really is… a bunch of really good sentences.
Love, Shelby
The history of hysteria is a preposterous, infuriating, yet kinda comical rabbit hole, if you’re interested