A review by kayteeolson
Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen by Suzanne Scanlon

emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

i loved this book—reflections on mental illness, feminism, art, writing, motherhood, and society. adding highlighted passages here: 

  • "Writing is like suicide, she wrote, only you don’t have to die."
  • "My memory of a book written by a man is never lit up like my memory of a book written by a woman."
  • "We never have it again, that first time. To read these books was to be held. I hadn’t understood that before, what a book was for. I’ve reread these novels many times since that first time. Each reading matters. As Susan Sontag put it, any book worth reading is worth rereading. Or Italo Calvino: There is no difference between reading and re-reading."
  • "Joan Didion on note keepers: Lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss, the notebooks were a way of noting: This is what it was like to be me."
  • "DurasSpace is awareness, the link between youth and old age, between sanity and madness, between the consummation of love and the desire for solitude. The necessity of solitude. I am only now at this point in my life trying to be solitary. I am nineteen and I have had sex with exactly one person."
  • "For the girl in Indochina, this affair with the older man from Cholon, this early sexual experience is an opening not only to love but desire, the way this desire, the intensity of passion, of sex, would allow her to understand who she was, who she could be. Desire would make her into who she would be. She was a writer, she knew this, and the extremity of this passion, and her awareness of the impossibility built into it, this was the beginning of her story—the story of an artist. The education of a young girl, this portrait of the artist as a young girl in love."
  • "It is a chemical reaction—it is magic, I have always thought—that moment of reception between reader and book. The time must be right. You can’t plan it, that vulnerability, that blur between self and text. It is that powerful, it will make and unmake you if you let it."
  • "The Lover is a great book, but it reached me deeply, formatively, because I needed it to."
  • "What the Buddhists say: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear."
  • "It is her love for school and her education that keeps her connected to life."
  • "As James Baldwin put it, in a passage I read many years later, You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."
  • "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well, she writes."
  • "A book is a way to speak to someone, across time and space. This book was telling me something about how to live. Other ways to live."
  • "Can a writer—a person—ever have too much empathy? I think Henry James was right when he wrote that those without empathy make our lives hell. Or Marguerite Duras: The only true democracy is that we all live the loss of the world."
  • "No one can say if the novel caused any young women or men to commit suicide. I can’t say, but I suspect that it helped me open that door, imagine that possibility in that particular time of my life. I was susceptible."
  • "part of the appeal of becoming the madwoman, or the hysteric, was that she would be relieved of her domestic responsibilities."
  • "In The Moral Career of the Mental Patient, sociologist Erving Goffman wrote of the effects of institutionalization, describing in detail the self-fulfilling quality of diagnosis: The patient desires a diagnosis, a parent, a healer. When she receives it, she needs to inhabit it, to make it her own."
  • "You are isolating, I was told many times. Don’t isolate. You are making yourself worse by isolating. If you isolate so much, no wonder you feel lonely or sad. But a life of reading and writing is a life of necessary isolation. This is what writers do."
  • "Other people would call this mental illness, or this was a way to think about it on that ward. But I experience this in life still, and I’m not the only one. I see it everywhere. Stephen King called it “the shining.” Others call it sensitivity, insecurity, shyness. Fragility. My son does not have this quality, and that is a relief to me."
  • "In those years art became a light—it showed me that there was a space for that wail, that longing."
  • "I don’t know what I think until I read what I say, as Flannery O’Connor put it."
  • "The end of the day, just before sunset, the light that makes me cry these days. Simple and profound. Seasons and time."
  • "Though she wished to be considered as equal to the male writers of her generation, writing for a woman remained her greatest pleasure—to be read by a woman, she writes, is like being a violin and being played upon."
  • "Because everyone knows that emotions are not discrete, do not set themselves apart, so that you might never get ahold of one. After all, I read novels. I knew what emotions were. I knew nothing was one thing. I read to know about other people’s emotions and so learned about my own—I learned that mine were not unusual at all. I loved how writers described feelings—I read that Emma Bovary wanted both to die and to live in Paris— and I came to know myself."
  • "Books were offering me the knowledge of another life, a larger and sustaining framework—life-affirming."
  • "That I could not look outside of myself is one way I know that I was ill. The narcissism of suffering."
  • "She needs to write to survive. She is writing so that she can feel less strange to herself."
  • "I know that in many cases, for many people, a diagnosis can help locate and treat real experiences of pain, but there are many ways for us to find comfort in the preexisting condition of being human, which is always inexplicable, on some level. This is why we read books. This is why I needed the stories of these other women."

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