In her new memoir Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, Suzanne Scanlon recounts the years she spent in New York State Psychiatric Institute and Hospital. In chapters oscillating between memoir and criticism, Scanlon narrates her own experience while disassembling notions of madness, recovery, patienthood, diagnosis, and the asylum. She situates her story within—and also pushes against—the canon of “crazy chicks,” whose memoirs were published while she was hospitalized in the early nineties. And yet Scanlon’s depiction of her artistic development suggests an appealingly thorny relationship between ideation and identification. “We don’t always get to pick our influence,” she writes. Summoning Sylvia Plath, Marguerite Duras, Shulamith Firestone, and Janet Frame, Committed becomes a love-letter-cum-Künstlerroman, revealing with dazzling fervor what it means to be enraptured by the page.
I talked with Scanlon about creative nonfiction, keeping notebooks, and the work of self-excavation.
JoAnna Novak: This is your first book of creative nonfiction. How has the lead up to publication differed between this book and your previous books, both fiction? Why a memoir now?
Suzanne Scanlon: Genre-wise, it’s not as significant—I have to be ready to discuss more of the truth because it’s a memoir. If I think of Vivian Gornick‘s situation and story, I use the material of my life as a situation—that happens in all my work. What feels different is being with a big press. My other books were with independent presses.
Committed started as mini-essays. Writing a memoir has to do with an understanding of myself that comes with age. I could see things through the lens of creative nonfiction. I don’t think 10 or 15 years ago I would’ve had the confidence I have now—I understand the experience in a different way.
JN: I found Committed arresting and ultra-readable, which seems tied to the voice. One can’t get enough of a writer’s voice. How did you craft the narrative voice?
SS: Sigrid Nunez says if you have the tone in the first 10 pages, then you’ve got the book. In her recent fiction, there’s a memoir-like persona, an older woman looking backwards, understanding the scope of life. There’s something about getting over yourself that I think happened to me with age. I don’t want to say that too confidently—obviously I have my vanities—but that happened in my writing.
I shared the essays I was writing with my agent. She liked them and said, what if we shape this into a memoir with a larger overarching story? The essays were very much engaged with film and literature. I hadn’t really thought of a memoir. So I wrote a proposal. That became the frame. When I got the contract and started writing, I wanted it to have a novel’s propulsion. I started with scenes and the return section. That tone, that voice, grounded me in the book. I knew after writing that first section who was telling the story. There are register shifts and tone shifts, but I could come back to that guiding storyteller.
JN: What craft elements were most familiar to you as a fiction writer? Did the memoir pose any unique technical challenges?
SS: A memoir has to have good storytelling. Character development, scene, setting. You have to bring the world alive. All of that was familiar to me. It’s easier for me to do that with the material of my life, even if I call it fiction—that’s how I work. So that was all quite comfortable and fun. I loved writing the part of it that felt like writing fiction. My readers helped me a lot. They’d remind me that, with memoir, you have to reflect on this situation. That’s different from fiction. You need that reflective voice. I set up that voice from the beginning, this older narrator looking back. That can be cloying in memoirs, but I tried to do it with enough room for speculation that I didn’t feel like I was losing something of the truth.
JN: In the third part, there’s a chapter titled the “Notebooks.” What was it like to self-excavate? Has that changed the way you keep notebooks, if you still keep notebooks?
SS: I wrote those notebooks as if I had to. It was so committed, truly passionate as if nothing else in my life worked. Often it was the thing I could do, that and exercising made me feel like, Okay, I can get through the day. It’s so different now. I don’t write a notebook anything like I did as a young woman—I don’t really have time. And when I have time to write, I have things I want to write or things I have to write. It’s funny. It doesn’t seem as desperate. It doesn’t seem as valuable as a way to spend my time. I mean, is it an early writer’s process? Sarah Manguso writes about this in Ongoingness. I’ve heard Sigrid Nunez talk about it, too, how it changed as she got older. You just feel, how much time do I have left? How many books do I have left to write? Time gets more limited, having a kid, having 10 jobs. If I find time, I have to write something that’s going to be published. Back then, the idea of being published was such a fantasy that I was writing for some other audience.
JN: This is a memoir not only of being committed in the hospital, but also being committed to a vocation, writing and reading. How did you arrive at the title?
SS: It was not a title I wanted for a long time, but I love it now because the book surprised me in the way that it became a space to look at how I committed to something else without really knowing how to commit to that. Without knowing it was possible. Without knowing it would get me anywhere. It got me to this place where I could feel connected. Most of the rest of the world and the structures of the world as presented to me at the time left me feeling quite alienated.
I’m always telling students it’s about the process. We say that all the time, but notebooks are the perfect example. The product to me is so not interesting or valuable except that it represents that process of committing—I’m going to just write and I’m going to write awful stuff. Richard Wright talks about reading his heroes and when he tries to write, he’s so far from writing like them, but he keeps doing it. That really is process. For many of us, you have to do that for a long, long time. We have to do this stuff over and over, and then at some point, some kind of clarity or voice emerges. For me, committing to reading and writing without it being something I could publish was part of getting to something that would stand on its own.
JN: Committed portrays reading as not quite redemption or salvation but close. Yet you consider that narratives can give us scripts for our suffering.
SS: I’m uncomfortable with the simple statement of “books saved us” as much as I agree they do. They can open up possibilities that weren’t there—and those possibilities aren’t always helpful. I’m thinking about The Bell Jar from this vantage as someone who doesn’t identify with Esther Greenwood. My identification at the time that I first read it was so intense and beyond anything I could articulate. It was thrilling, but I didn’t know what to do with it—I didn’t have the distance back then. It’s scary to say because the people who want to ban books want to say that, but I was young and susceptible, and I was looking for models and mothers and conversations. There was something so enticing and validating about the literature of madness, of breaking down, of completely falling apart, of suicide, Esther Greenwood’s clarity and intelligence around it. Same with Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. Now as a writer, I’m in awe of the craft, but as a young woman, there was something so fluid and unformed in myself and books saved me—but they also shaped certain experiences.
When I read Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, I saw this identification as part of a larger conversation. Again, in terms of the historical moment: my English major was very distant from autobiography and the way you’d respond emotionally to a text. For English majors now, all this stuff about your feelings is very alive. That’s exciting. If that would’ve been happening when I was an undergrad, I think I would’ve loved that. But I only discovered it later, reading psychoanalytic people and feminists. That was validating to me. To know it was an important and powerful way to read, to respond to a book, to a character, to identify that totally. I love the idea that you could talk about how a book makes you feel.
JN: In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur W. Frank, one of my favorite thinkers on illness, writes: “Stories are a way of redrawing maps and finding new destinations.” What maps did you hope Committed would redraw?
SS: The map of having been a mental patient and that being an important story. That’s the hook of the book. That was what allowed me to get closer to the part about becoming a reader and writer, becoming an artist. Being a mental patient was just one stop on the map. As I write about Allen Ginsberg or Janet Frame, it can be quite an important stop, but it’s not the story. The bigger story is you’re a writer and you’re an artist, and you’re forced to live in this world that sucks, that’s not meant for people who are super sensitive and fragile and absorb things so completely and can’t always just go along with whatever we’re supposed to do. That’s how I want to change the map. The bigger story is: How do you figure out how to live in this world that’s not meant for this kind of complexity?
