New York’s Emily Gould speaks with novelist and English professor Suzanne Scanlon about her memoir ‘Committed,’ the three years she spent in a mental hospital, and how she eventually got out.
It’s almost unimaginable now that Suzanne Scanlon, who’s an English professor in Chicago and the author of two novels, spent three years of her early 20s in a state mental institution. As a Barnard student, she’d attempted suicide, suffering from a depression that stemmed from her unresolved grief over the death of her mother when Scanlon was only 8 years old.
So that was part of the question of the book. And because I see how shitty mental-health care is now. There are things about the attention I got and the kind of help I got that people don’t get today that led me to be this person who could survive in the world. A lot of people don’t get that. I also wanted to acknowledge the complexity of the experience. And maybe in, it was more negative to me and it was more absurd, I think.
In your notebook, you wrote down a line that one of the doctors said that you felt was a key insight for you, that actually helped you. I was able to make this internal decision to stop letting myself think about suicide as an option. And I absolutely wasn’t able to say any of this at the time because I didn’t really believe it. It’s only many, many years later, looking at what happened, that I see that that was very important. It was like quitting a drug. That was about the same time I had started Nardil.
What about the books that you lived in and that shaped you and that you bring into this book so gracefully? You write a lot about Virginia Woolf and also about the Charlotte Perkins Gilman story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and the way you initially read those things and the way that you read them later in life, especially as you were teaching them.
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