Unity Books x West Auckland Book Club

Join Unity bookseller Chloe in conversation on this memoir about making meaning out of madness. I'm fascinated to get into the discussion around how female madness has been treated throughout history, predominantly the 1800s (not least because a man could declare his wife mad if he wanted to get a divorce and have her locked up). As well as the art of memoir writing and Suzanne's portrayal of her experience in a New York State Psychiatric Unit.

You can pre-order the book here. Select pick-up in store and leave a note for Chloe to bring to West Auckland if you'd like to collect from Crafty Baker.

‘A deep, sometimes harrowing book about loss, grief, and the way literary representations of mental illness shaped Scanlon’s experience of her own life’ Emily Gould, The Cut

‘Visceral, raw and tender, this candid and timely memoir is, at heart, a love-letter to the profound and redemptive power of literature’ Annabel Abbs

‘An immensely talented writer, at her finest, cutting through propriety and convention to reach what is essential, meaningful, real’ Amina CainWhen Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s and grieving the loss of her mother, 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-discovery are reduced to ‘madwoman’ narratives.Transporting, honest and unflinching, 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, Shulamith Firestone and others.

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