New Books In Gender Studies

Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen (Vintage, 2024) is a critical memoir about women, reading, and mental illness. 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 after, 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. She searched for more books, more woman writers, as the journey of her life converged with her journey through the literature that shaped her. Committed is a story of discovery and of questioning linear and neat ideas of recovery. It reclaims the idea of the madwoman as a template for insight and transcendence through the works of