When 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.

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 Cain

Suzanne Scanlon is the author of two works of fiction, the critically acclaimed Promising Young Women (Dorothy 2012) and the experimental novel Her 37th Year, An Index (Noemi 2015). Her first work of nonfiction, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, is forthcoming from Vintage and John Murray in the UK. Scanlon has taught at conferences and colleges nationwide; and has been awarded fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Ox-Bow Artists Residency, and the Ragdale Foundation. She is the recipient of an MFA from Northwestern University and teaches creative writing at Northwestern and the School of the Art Institute Chicago.

John Murray, 2025, 369pages.