
Committed
On Meaning and Madwomen
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Narrated by:
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Suzanne Scanlon
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By:
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Suzanne Scanlon
About this listen
A raw and masterful memoir 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.
Cover painting: "Morning Sun" (detail), 1952, by Edward Hopper © 2024 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. Photo by Artothek/Bridgeman Images.
©2024 Suzanne Scanlon (P)2024 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Not since Marguerite Duras have we had such an intimate and moving voice. Among the very finest and most intelligent memoirs ever written—and with such generosity towards those who suffer mental pain (which is, all of us)."—Clancy Martin, author of How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind
"[An] affecting memoir. . . . If the hospital ward where Scanlon stayed felt at times like a “foreign country,” books served as a ballast for her fragile psyche."—The New Yorker
"Suzanne Scanlon’s memoir Committed is a lyrical and illuminating account of a young woman’s struggle with mental illness and institutionalization. Mining the metaphors endemic to the institutional setting—the way madness or insanity is “a story the patients are told and learn to tell about themselves”—and making use of medical records and her own journals alongside literary depictions and descriptions of treatment, Scanlon questions the cultural conversations around women and mental illness, framing a compelling narrative of her own recovery and redemption."—Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Native Guard and two-time Poet Laureate of the United States
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Story
In this close-up look at the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was seventeen and he was forty-seven and married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1990s memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth when she wrote about their passion back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love.
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Intimate Story Well-told
- By Hard2Please on 06-29-24
By: Jill Ciment
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Sure, I'll Join Your Cult
- A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere
- By: Maria Bamford
- Narrated by: Maria Bamford
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Maria Bamford is a comedian’s comedian (an outsider among outsiders) and has forever fought to find a place to belong. From struggling with an eating disorder as a child of the 1980s, to navigating a career in the arts (and medical debt and psychiatric institutionalization), she has tried just about every method possible to not only be a part of the world, but to want to be a part of it. In Bamford’s “trademark blend of disarming intimacy and dark whimsy” (Publishers Weekly), Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult brings us on a quest to participate in something.
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Hilarious and sincere
- By B. Bazzell on 09-06-23
By: Maria Bamford
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Simple Passion
- By: Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 1 hr and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.
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Pulitzer Prize Winner
- By Kimberly on 10-17-22
By: Annie Ernaux, and others
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Heavy
- By: Kiese Laymon
- Narrated by: Kiese Laymon
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Kiese Laymon is a fearless writer. In his essays, personal stories combine with piercing intellect to reflect both on the state of American society and on his experiences with abuse, which conjure conflicted feelings of shame, joy, confusion, and humiliation. Laymon invites us to consider the consequences of growing up in a nation wholly obsessed with progress yet wholly disinterested in the messy work of reckoning with where we’ve been.
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Be prepared
- By Amy Eberle on 10-30-18
By: Kiese Laymon
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It Lasts Forever and Then It's Over
- By: Anne de Marcken
- Narrated by: Jessica Preddy
- Length: 3 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Traveling across the landscapes of time and of space, heading always west, and carrying a dead but laconically opinionated crow in her chest, our undead narrator encounters and loses parts of her body and her self in one terrifying, hilarious, and heartbreaking situation after another.
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The manner of which this book was written
- By Vanessa on 03-31-25
By: Anne de Marcken
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No One Gets to Fall Apart
- A Memoir
- By: Sarah LaBrie
- Narrated by: Sarah LaBrie
- Length: 6 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie’s mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The diagnosis of schizophrenia that followed compelled Sarah to rethink her childhood, marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness. Digging into the events that led to her mother’s break, Sarah traces her family history of mental illness, from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown.
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I loved it so much
- By Mildred Bright on 11-23-24
By: Sarah LaBrie
I enjoyed the book overall though and would recommend it. The audio version was a bit difficult for me because (I’m not sure if it was the microphone the author was using or what) many words sounded lisping. I have misophonia, so this is probably just a “me problem.” Anyway, give this book a shot! It’s thought-provoking for sure, and, as a fellow “professional patient,” I appreciate reading others’ experiences and finding connection there.
Intelligent and poetic
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