Suzanne Scanlon’s Life Was Shaped by Books—for Better and for Worse
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,
