Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen by Suzanne Scanlon

Our September pick of the month had us really thinking… Last September 2024 our theme was madwoman and our non-fiction book of the month was Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen by Suzanne Scanlon. We were even lucky enough to welcome her into our community for an evening.

Read this book if you have interests in how gender and madness intersect.

MORE ABOUT COMMITTED: ON MEANING AND MADWOMEN:

A raw and masterful memoir and cultural exploration 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 larger: 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.

Transporting, honest, and graceful, Committed is a story of discovery and recovery, reclaiming the idea of the madwoman as a template for insight and transcendence through the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, Shulamith Firestone, and others.

Product Details