"I would not be who I am if I hadn’t learned about madness, hadn’t made a study of it"
A conversation with Suzanne Scanlon, author of the memoir Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen
CW: for topical discussion of attempted suicide and mental illness
In her new memoir, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, Suzanne Scanlon recounts her own institutionalization in the 90s in New York, after a suicide attempt. But as Scanlon writes, “The best the word crazy can do is point to something on the surface, a symptom. It is not the story.”
Scanlon’s story is in part about the nature of madness and what it has offered her as an artist, but she understands that “madness” is a term that contrasts sharply with those used in modern psychiatry and pop psychology. Madness generalizes, which can cause discomfort in an age of increasingly precise diagnoses. But to use the term madness is also to evoke an understanding of “a truth only allowed by unreason.” She defines the term as “premodern” and “literary, philosophical”— the stuff of mad men and lovers and Shakespeare, but also Virginia Woolf and Shulamith Firestone and other “women with messed-up lives” who should not be brought up at dinner parties, lest we betray the fact that we take those lives utterly seriously.
Scanlon’s book does not, however, sentimentalize or glamorize madness, nor does she lack, anywhere in the book, specificity. Instead, she offers an account of a life, her life, shaped by the deep and careful study of madness— her own, but also others’. Her story is about those formative three years spent at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, but it’s also about reading, writing, and losing her mother when she was young— a loss that created an endless yearning she filled with art. It’s a story about learning to see writing as a place to arrange one’s self and to meet the limits of comprehensibility, and about becoming an artist, which ultimately means becoming “true to yourself alone.” It’s also about coming to understand aesthetic creation as a place we go to cry for our lost mothers.
It’s one of the most brilliant stories I’ve read in recent years. In our conversation below, we discuss the role of literature in the age of "therapy-speak,” how writing inhabits a space between sanity and insanity, and the spirituality of reading, teaching, and writing.
You write about feeling self-conscious when you were asked to explain what this book was about while you were working on it. Now that it’s in the world, how would you describe Committed for a reader?
It is a book about grief, mental illness, and reading. The back ad is marketing, fitting this book into a genre that I was constantly subverting. The mental illness genre was a container that allowed me to write what I see now as both a kunstlerroman [a story of an artist’s coming of age] and a spiritual autobiography.
How did this book come together, and what did your research and writing process look like? I found the way you handle multiple time periods and critical questions to be so elegant—as well as how you use different section and chapter breaks throughout to organize the text. I would imagine you did quite a bit of research, too, while working on the book?
The process of writing and finding those time breaks and jumps was intuitive, something that comes from decades of reading and writing. The small titles were also intuitive. Adam Phillips has said that “the books you write have to do with the books you read” and that’s the best way to explain this book. It has everything to do with what I’ve read and admired and reread - even if I can’t always pinpoint exactly which books influenced this book, there are so many, a lifetime of reading. I have spent some years teaching creative nonfiction, the essay, and so everyone from Montaigne to Joan Didion to Claudia Rankine has informed my sense of style and possibility for the genre.
The research followed the writing, most of it was rereading, returning to Shulamith Firestone, Erving Goffman’s Asylums. Janet Frame’s novels and autobiography. I read the new biography of Sylvia Plath, by Heather Clark, as well as Hermione Lee’s biography of Virginia Woolf. Everything I read and researched was thrilling, even that bizarre New York Times article, or the Change.org petitions.
I also love how meticulously you define “madness” in the book— as a premodern term that resists the biomedical diagnostic, but also as “spiritual.” Can you share what you mean by “spirituality,” how you developed this connection to books during and after your hospitalization, and how it comes up in your reading and writing today?
Using the word madness with an awareness of its historic and literary context was most helpful in articulating a truth about my experiences and singularity as a person. I had to constantly question (I still do) received opinions and orthodoxies, particularly about religion and gender and our diagnostic culture. I would not be who I am if I hadn’t learned about madness, hadn’t made a study of it, or found my way into it. I didn’t have a choice, but from this vantage I can say I don’t regret it. It was a breaking down of boundaries, a push, it was there always, a kind of humming beneath the surface. I think it first became clear to me with my mom’s illness and death - that there was this easy enough slip into oblivion, that we are all a moment away from it. And then my unconscious desire to follow her there.
As a reader of Sylvia Plath, Sarah Kane, William Styron, and so many others, I just find so much truth in the way that madness complicates and expands all that we’ve decided constitutes a person. Virginia Woolf’s Septimus is a wonderful example of this, his war trauma a quite understandable and heartbreaking descent into madness, which is of course dismissed and misunderstood by his doctors.
I wonder if you experience some of this spirituality in teaching, too.
Yes, very much so. It’s a sacred exchange.
I’d love to talk more about how everyday language, as compared to our experience of language and emotion in literature, functions here. For example, diagnosis, you write in one section of the book, can make the experience of madness or one’s symptoms into a kind of cliché, even as that kind of categorization can also be vital for those seeking recognition and support. Where do you see literature and art fitting in here, especially today, in the era of “therapy-speak”?
I loved David Foster Wallace’s short story “The Depressed Person” when it was first published in Harper’s, in the late nineties. It was formative for me (not long after, I decided to move to Normal, IL to study with him). I don’t love that story now (I taught it once, never again), but at the time it was a profound shock of recognition. He was the first contemporary author I knew who’d found a way to both recognize the need we have for these systems of therapy-speak and categorization, simply because many of us are in terrible pain and need help; yet at the same time, he was remarking on the fact that this language can feel utterly reductive and deadening. Offensive to a larger sense of personhood. It’s the trap we have to live in, some of us do. Through that story, I saw that you could acknowledge that duality, in a way that rarely happens in so-called real life.
In recent years, there’s been a real push to disidentify artists and the artistic process as mad. What I love so much about your book is how it simultaneously releases the tortured poet cliché, and embraces the inherent “madness” of artmaking. Can you say a bit more about your claim that writing inhabits a space between sanity and insanity?
Is this true? I didn’t realize it. Every writer I know is a little bit crazy. I mean, every writer I love and admire. You spend this much time alone, working through words and ideas and making up characters and stories on a page, and then the utter OCD process of revising and editing and trying to get things right. Why can’t we just admit this relationship? We know that many of the activities practiced by writers and depressed people - i.e. ruminating, isolating, obsessing, “over-thinking” (that horrible phrase I hear a lot these days) - are not the most healthy habits. I know plenty of tortured poets. Of course you have to stay sane, but I think it’s silly to pretend that their inner wounds don’t influence or make the work. The trick and challenge is to live in a way that sustains you, stabilizes you - whatever that might mean for you, including taking psych meds, for some of us - but allow that madness to come alive in your writing, but not let it destroy you. That Flaubert line of advice - to be boring and bourgeois in your life, so that you can be wild in your writing.
What has it been like for you, as a woman who writes about and studies madness, to work in academia?
Do you mean have I been discriminated against or judged harshly?
Yes, exactly.
I am so completely adjunctian and precarious, I wouldn’t even know. Working in academia seems a very elevated way of describing the work I do, which is real work, real labor, and I’ve been doing this for over twenty years now, and I’m very good at it - and yet I have never been compensated or rewarded or acknowledged for that work in any way that comes near to my achievements. I’ve stopped feeling angry about it. I’ve learned to work the trap of it, because I do love it. Teaching is rewarding to me as a writer - but it is not financially rewarding. I’ve been underpaid my entire career. I’m not unique in this regard.
So maybe that all has to do with the fact that I seriously don’t give a fuck what my colleagues or academic departments think of me based on this bold assertion or revelation of my mental illness. Whether or not it affects my job prospects. I would like to say it doesn’t or hasn’t, that the system is exploitative regardless.
But there is some freedom in being part of this Undercommons, as Fred Moten calls it - I truly don’t give a shit. I’ll write what I want. Maybe I would anyway, but who knows - I certainly never worry whether or not I’ll lose my job over this.
Perhaps the most powerful thread in your book, for me, is the deep love and longing between mother and daughter. You describe reading Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun (a favorite theoretical text of mine!), a book that claims art is a dedication to the lost mother.
I think this was so affirming to me as a young reader. That so many of these great books were fueled by this mother love. That coming of age as a woman had so much to do with that very specific and idiosyncratic relationship.
Other authors and books you draw on serve a similar healing function— reading becomes reparative for you, as you say. The idea that books can change us, though, as you note, is sometimes seen as an unserious one. Can you talk about how you came to see the power of literature as a serious subject? This seems so timely, in an era of book banning—especially what you write in the book about the risk and danger of reading.
I don’t want to overstate the risk or danger: more serious is the threat or trend of book banning. But it is important to acknowledge that yes we are deeply shaped by the “media” we consume, that’s not debatable, and for some of us who are more malleable or susceptible, this can be life changing, not always for the best. As I say with Plath, it opens up a realm of possibility.
You also write that a reader must be open to a book for it to really have that kind of effect. In your teaching, is there anything you say to your students about how they might open themselves up to a book, as they read?
I tell students to follow their passions, read wildly and promiscuously. Find influence everywhere. Read work having the conversations you want to have. At the same time, I urge them to read important and influential books, to force themselves (I myself had to force my 19 year old self to read Anna Karenina, Ulysses, The Magic Mountain, and other difficult books.)
There is a discipline to reading, just as with writing. I kept lists. I read what I was drawn to, what thrilled me, and I made myself read some books because I’d been told they mattered. I read Nabokov and Erica Jong and Toni Morrison. I read Portnoy’s Complaint and Milton. Read across genre, poetry, essay, plays, theory, arts criticism. There’s not enough time. You have to get good at being alone; you have to sit still and stop looking at your phone or following the very powerful distraction of these devices. It’s harder now but it wasn’t easy when I began reading this way, at 19. Set timers. Make it a religion. Go to mass and by that I mean sit in a space with a book, for at least an hour a day. It will feed you, more than you know. This is the only way you can become a writer, by the way. If you don’t read this way, your writing will be empty. What’s the point.
This made me lol:
I am so completely adjunctian and precarious, I wouldn’t even know.
Only because since starting an MFA I am learning all about that precarity!
Loved this conversation
Great line: “…but allow that madness to come alive in your writing, but not let it destroy you.”