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reissemyy 's review for:
Promising Young Women
by Suzanne Scanlon
dark
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
A book about the acuity of language that is, fittingly, full of reflective specificity about what was once, for the narrator, a lack of it. A powerful collection about the facets of a woman—and of many women—facing mental illness in a hospital, where each room, each essay, builds a life of before, after, and now.
There’s an undercurrent about beauty—how the more beautiful a patient is, or the more beautiful her words, the more medicine seeks to cure her, to make her pain legible and salable. It’s a sharp tension, especially knowing the narrator is also an actor: a worldly woman, and one deeply tired of the space she occupies.
Performance, subjectivity, storytelling—it’s all here. There is so much Madness (with a capital M), and yet so much dignity. This work insists on both.
There’s an undercurrent about beauty—how the more beautiful a patient is, or the more beautiful her words, the more medicine seeks to cure her, to make her pain legible and salable. It’s a sharp tension, especially knowing the narrator is also an actor: a worldly woman, and one deeply tired of the space she occupies.
Performance, subjectivity, storytelling—it’s all here. There is so much Madness (with a capital M), and yet so much dignity. This work insists on both.