W-3
Bette Howland
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
W-3
Bette Howland
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
... the book feels at once crafted, its prose full of calibrated grace, and startlingly unmediated. No brush (with obscurity) is necessary to buff its surface.
This is not a story of mere neglect but of a writer’s collusion with invisibility, with a lifelong ambivalence toward selfhood and its burdens.
... a slim, witty and uncompromising memoir.
Howland’s story is not so much the description of her inner experience as it is a kind of group portrait of the ward.
... brilliantly observant.
W-3 is a debut and, as debuts go, it’s very fine, at moments dazzlingly and daringly written. In the early 70s, it was not beholden on a writer to tip-toe around the subject of mental illness, to worry about terminology or stereotyping; it is a ruthlessly straightforward, almost impudent book and all the better and wiser for it. Its author captures quite brilliantly the comical competitiveness of her fellow patients.
W-3 is not a recognizable form. What does one expect from a memoir about being institutionalized in a psychiatric ward? If there is a singular confession, it is cleverly eased over: yes, a suicide attempt, yes, a note on the method, yes, an insight into the machinery that kicks into action once you survive an attempt in 1960s urban America. But it is not a memoir that confesses to an intimate or spectacular inhabitation of neuroses.
The voice is cool and the gaze is clear: Howland doesn’t 'indulge' in reflections on her trauma or make any attempts to romanticise her illness—instead her focus is outwards, onto the ward and her fellow patients. It is a startlingly frank account of mental illness, and the contradictions and humiliations of life as a patient. In fact, the least modern thing about it might be that frankness—Howland is plainly unhampered by the need to watch her language.
... compelling and lucid.
... [Howland's] first book resurfaces with all its epigrammatic, disconcerting, and incandescent firepower intact ...[a] clinically observed yet compassionate, drolly and bravely matter-of-fact memoir.