I was first introduced to Suzanne Scanlon at Dixon Place in the Lower East Side of Manhattan over a decade ago, at a now seemingly prescient gathering that Kate Zambreno had assembled in collaboration with Belladonna* Collaborative: a reading and conversation examining the intersection of fiction and the essay, with Renee Gladman, Amina Cain, and Danielle Dutton. I’d encountered Scanlon’s writing the previous year within the exhilarating but short- lived blog ecosystem teeming with brilliant female writers, of which Scanlon and Zambreno were essential components. In Scanlon’s blog, RepatBlues, she wrote with an intimacy befitting a personal notebook; and without fully revealing her identity, she posted candid accounts of her reading life, teaching, motherhood, and the messiness of being a self.
Writing, for Scanlon, is the essential crucible through which the material of life is transformed into art, and in a way that’s usually not obscured by the guise of artifice. One senses that, for her, living is a form of research, but also that art and writing are just as essential in informing her life. Scanlon has said she thought of her second book, Her 37th Year, an Index, as a fictional memoir in the same way that her first book of interlinked stories, Promising Young Women, published by Dorothy, a publishing project, in 2012, could be considered a nonfiction novel: “Both are constructions. Both take from life, and both invent.”
Her most recent book, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, stands apart from her previous two as a bona fide memoir. Scanlon draws firmly from the realm of her lived experience, taking on unprocessed grief from her childhood—her mother died of breast cancer when she was eight—and viewing this in light of the three years she spent in the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) after a suicide attempt at age twenty, only a few months after she’d moved to New York to attend Barnard College. She’d transferred there after a gap year spent in Chicago waitressing and reading rabidly. A few months after her arrival at NYSPI, Scanlon was moved to a long-term ward, where she ended up living for years and leaving just before the ward was defunded and closed. Scanlon examines all this in order to interrogate and understand the systems and constructs she experienced, and within which mental illness was treated but also perpetuated. She writes, too, about the madwomen writers, such as Janet Frame and Virginia Woolf, who acted as beacons and who gave her a reason to believe in writing as a way back to life.
Scanlon conveys in a few sentences what other writers will dilate on about for pages. There’s a profundity to her work, and yet it’s never without the acknowledgment that language can fail you, her, anyone, at any moment. Her language rarely fails, perhaps because of this awareness, and because of her adherence to Wittgenstein’s proposition “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Perhaps it’s Scanlon’s less read book, Her 37th Year, that adheres to this best—its narrative unfolds in a nonlinear fashion, through brief entries that provide glimpses into the narrator’s life as a wife and young mother approaching forty, whose marriage has acquired a lackluster veneer. Published in 2015, the book should be de rigueur reading for those drawn to the recent spate of books engaging with the subject of aging, divorce, and desire. Her 37th Year shares with Miranda July’s All Fours, especially, a desire to interrogate and subvert the canned societal narratives about women in their forties. In the entry titled “Discourse,” Scanlon’s narrator declares, “I don’t want to write a mommy narrative or a menopause narrative. As Eileen Myles said, ‘I want to [be] punk about aging.’”
That energy—that desire to interrogate and shift the narrative handed to us by society, by our families, that we absorb and often repeat to ourselves as a result—carries throughout Scanlon’s books, regardless of their genre. Through one lens or another, Scanlon examines modes of care, loneliness, and selfhood, and actively writes against the desire for resolution. In Scanlon’s realm, nothing’s static, and we are always returning to the blank page.
—Anne K. Yoder
I. WRITING THE SILENCES
THE BELIEVER: You quote Flannery O’Connor in your memoir, Committed, in a chapter that recalls the time surrounding your mother’s death, when you were eight: “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” It’s easy to see how your three books have been seeded from and deal with this initial loss, grief, and depression, and, later, your time spent in a psychiatric ward processing this grief. It’s more than enough. I am curious how you view this first loss as a source or impetus for writing?
SUZANNE SCANLON: It took a while for me to think that writing about my experience was a possibility. It felt pretty risky. In childhood there were so many things I wasn’t allowed to say; I’m not saying I was neglected or abused, but in every family there are certain things you can’t talk about. For me, that just heightened my loneliness and sense of not being understood. I recently heard Diane Seuss, whose father died when she was seven, talking about this. She said, You don’t go through something like facing death and seeing a parent disappear at that age without asking big questions about life and what it means to be alive. So, inevitably, my writing always went to those places. When I sat down to write, I was drawn to extreme expressions of emotion and heightened psychic difficulty. Because that was what I felt wasn’t allowed, and I knew there was truth there. I knew, at some level, that was the proper response to everything I’d been feeling and going through. So it’s not surprising. Even though I wish I didn’t keep writing about the same thing, it’s not surprising that I did. That I do.
BLVR: I think everyone writes the same story again and again. And I know I’m not the first person to say that.
SS: Me too. I always tell my students that.
BLVR: Your work often explores how writing is a way to talk about what can’t be said. I’m thinking of how Promising Young Women begins. I love its first sentence: “Ever since I heard Don Reakes say that the beauty contestant deserved to be raped by Mike Tyson, I wanted him dead.” There is such strength in that, a strength that Lizzie doesn’t even recognize within herself. And it’s like, yeah, she is saying it. But also she doesn’t speak it. She writes it.
SS: Exactly. I was just thinking about how Mike Tyson is in the news again, all these years later, and no one thinks about him in relation to that time. I know now what to do with rage and how it relates to writing, and how to deal with it in my life. But then, that was part of coming out of childhood and adolescence—confronting the unspeakable. Rage was a big part of that. Not just horror and sadness and grief but also anger. In childhood, this world of my experience was closed off, and I wasn’t allowed to talk about it. And at the same time, there was all this talk that was so far from what matters and what’s real. So many coming-of-age books depict this, like The Catcher in the Rye or Franny and Zooey. They’re based on the awareness of the hypocrisy of society, of how people talk about things but don’t talk about things that matter and are full of shit all the time. As a young person having to live in that world—in my family, at least—there’s this contrast: not only were we not talking about this, but we were using this false, Hallmark language to pretend. It’s so much better to not say anything. Writing allows the space for silence, too, to honor what shouldn’t be said. Even if I’m working to try to say it, even if I’m never going to get there.
BLVR: One thing that really struck me in Promising Young Women, and throughout your books, is the way that people, frequently men, will project their idea of how a woman should be onto women—especially young, attractive women. Men just say the damnedest things.
SS: Yeah, it’s amazing.
BLVR: I was wondering how much of your anger was responding to that type of projection and the assumption that their commentary is wanted or welcome. I feel like it’s something that every young woman is aware of.
SS: I think it was a mixture. I had very low self-esteem, and I was very ugly to myself. I had buckteeth and no boys were interested in me in high school. So on some level, I wanted male attention. I wanted to be pretty and whatever that offered. But there’s the flip side. It also can be a trap. It’s so funny, and I say this in Committed: You don’t think it’s such a big problem when you’re young, because you’re on the side of being highly valued—but being seen as young and attractive puts you in this passive position. As you get older you realize this. I was already slightly passive and I took everything too seriously, including what men would say. I was waiting for approval in some ways. It was always fraught, because it’s not really how you want yourself affirmed, right? But I got used to looking for affirmation there.
It’s just part of becoming a self, but it’s all amped up in our culture—and even more now. I’m so glad I’m not young anymore. I see it even with my son. All the selfies, and looking at Instagram, and all the pictures of other beautiful women. Thank god I didn’t have that. It was hard enough just to look at magazines, with the constant awareness of not being good enough.
II. “EVEN THOUGH I HAD READING, I NEVER FELT LIKE I HAD AN ESCAPE”
BLVR: I was recently listening to a Hidden Brain podcast episode with a guest who had once been an aspiring stand-up comedian and now has a PhD in communications. She was talking about interpretations of art within the context of a personal desire for closure. People who just want to look at art and say That’s pretty have a greater desire for closure, in comparison with those who are more open to ambiguity, who are also generally more appreciative of conceptual art. There is a real personality divide between these two ways of seeing and being in the world.
SS: That describes the impulse within my family—that the best way to deal is to close it off. But of course, I was so thrilled by art, the theater, and discovering RE/Search’s Angry Women anthology, which is still a favorite. Discovering Karen Finley and the rage she expressed, that kind of feminist, and second-wave feminism. But more important, the theater, because that is where I developed as a writer, even though I thought I wanted to be an actress.
In my gap year, and then at Barnard, I was reading great literature; I had an early discovery of the theater of the absurd, where the theater can acknowledge this space of silence. It can acknowledge the impossibility of communication. It can have us sit in those places of ambiguity in a way that, to me, is among the most satisfying expressions of art, of what it means to be human. I remember reading Peer Gynt in my theater history classes, reading Ibsen, and then reading Ionesco and so on—and realizing that this was an approach to art and those were the kinds of concerns that felt closest to what I wanted in art. My excitement really wasn’t about being an actress in those plays, but it was about the world these writers are creating and speaking to.
BLVR: That’s a lot. I had a really profound experience reading The Doll’s House when I was fourteen or fifteen.
SS: Oh, wow.
BLVR: And Nora, was it? She just leaves Torvald.
SS: Yeah, and that dancer. She spins around!
BLVR: Yeah. I thought, This is the best thing. It was so radical.
SS: In theater, more than in my lit classes at the time, it felt more alive. I just hadn’t yet discovered the literature that would feel the same way.
BLVR: There wasn’t the internet then, and you write about what that was like too. It involved a different way of finding, and of developing taste.
SS: I think about how hard I had to work to become better read. Part of it for me was simply that for so long my conviction was: I’m going to be an actress, I’m going to be in the theater. I thought I was reading obsessively to become an actress, but without realizing that, in doing so, I was reading to become a writer. The training is to read that much. To be exposed to those writers was such exciting training. I was lucky to be in a class where a teacher assigned Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, and it wasn’t even a college class.
BLVR: In Committed, you write about this time and space in the year before you transferred to Barnard, when you just read and read. The swath of time was spent in an apartment in Chicago, and when you weren’t working you were mostly alone, mostly reading. Anyone who becomes a writer comes to reading in their own way, but there’s something so profound and identifiable in the way you state this, about “the sacred relationship between a young woman and a book.” The aliveness you felt about reading is striking, especially when considered within the context of the isolation and sadness that you then felt in the everyday.
SS: I remember reading about the same kind of thing in Virginia Woolf’s biography by Quentin Bell, her nephew. It’s really a problematic biography; the Hermione Lee is much better. The most important relationships I had were in what I was reading, because they could fill that emptiness. I will not say it was enough—of course it wasn’t—but those relationships expanded my sense of possibility: of who I was, of being human, of what the world could offer, of feeling close to other people without having to actually be close to them.
I do not want to romanticize it, because honestly, at the time, I would never have said that I was lucky, or that I had all this time and space to read. It was miserable. But in retrospect, the reading fed me in a long-term way, more than anything else. I mean, as much as anything else. And in that way, I am lucky.
BLVR: I don’t think you’ve romanticized the experience. Maybe as a reader it’s easier to do that. Like, I’ve talked with friends about going to live in a convent or a monastery just to get away from everything. Which, you know, has its own issues.
SS: It was so hard to live in my head. Even though I had reading, I never felt like I had an escape. Most of the time I felt so trapped in my head, with this self-loathing. I felt like I was wasting time, that I should have been somewhere else, moving forward with my life. It never felt like, I’m doing something now that will feed me for the long run. But on the ward, what else did I have to do? We didn’t have computers or phones or the internet. There was a computer in the library. There was a TV, but I had kind of renounced television. There were people to talk to, but you could only talk to them so much. Maybe in hospitals they do take away phones now. I would hope there’s some limit, for healing of some kind. I would want that.
In my gap year, when I got serious about reading and discovered the world of Virginia Woolf, I forced myself to be a reader in a new way. I would set timers, like to sit for an hour and just read, because at that time in my life I was not a reader. I had lost that from childhood. I had to retrain myself. Now people have to do the same thing in a much more extreme way because of the internet. I stopped having a TV, even though I was never addicted to television.
I just watched The End of the Tour for the first time, about David Foster Wallace. In the movie they bring up his addiction to TV, and how he’d have it in his house, and then he would have to get rid of it because when he watched, he was obsessed and couldn’t stop binge-watching awful shows, like Knots Landing [laughs]—I don’t know if it was Knots Landing, but whatever it was that he watched. When he talks about it and when he writes about it, it’s so prescient. It is creepy listening to him talk about how we’re all staring into screens and watching things made by people who don’t care about us, right? Who want to sell us things or whatever. And he’s talking about TV in the early ’90s. It’s terrifying because it’s so much worse now. We’re carrying them around our pockets. It’s meant to just take all your time. And it does take my time. It’s sickening to me sometimes when I feel like, Oh my god, I’m trapped in this thing. So now I really relate to what he’s saying in a way I didn’t when he was talking about television.
III. “BEING FORGOTTEN ISN’T THE CRISIS”
BLVR: You moved from New York to work with him—David Foster Wallace.
SS: Yeah.
BLVR: At Illinois State. Was it because you found a connection with his work? And was it in conjunction with leaving acting?
SS: No, I moved to Chicago first. I remember so clearly being in my apartment here in Chicago, getting that Harper’s [Magazine] issue that had [Wallace’s short story] “The Depressed Person” in it, and that was it for me. I was still in New York when Infinite Jest came out, and a lot of people I knew, young men my age, were obsessed with it, and these were the same guys who were obsessed with Pynchon. I had no interest. I mean, I had just come out of Barnard, I was a feminist, and that was not my thing. It was such a guys’ book, and they were all the same kind of guy, and they still are, although now they paint their nails.
BLVR: In your book Her 37th Year, there’s an entry under “Oblivion” that talks about a teacher.
SS: I forgot about that part. Yeah, that was a reference to DFW.
BLVR: He assigned the essay “Oblivion” by the poet Donald Justice, who writes of turning to art as a spiritual vocation, usually as an adolescent. But then later he implies that the pursuit of an artistic vocation is the promise of oblivion later in life. It strikes me, reading your work, that vocation seems like the right word to describe what writing is for you. But writing as leading toward oblivion, being the author’s oblivion—that’s so weighted, especially in the context of suicide and David Foster Wallace.
SS: That essay was about three older male poets facing their awareness that maybe their work wouldn’t be remembered at all, and probably hasn’t been. I mean, people still know Donald Justice. With most writers, though, you devote your life to this, and most people aren’t read very much. But that’s not why you do it, right?
I’m really curious why DFW was obsessed with the essay. Then not long after that, he named his story and his story collection Oblivion. So maybe he was aware he was going to die soon, too, or at least was thinking about that. He had so much fame and attention, but there are so many writers for whom it never feels like enough. On a very different, unsexy note than David Foster Wallace: I’ve become interested in this writer Doris Grumbach. Do you know who she is?
BLVR: No, I don’t. I’m curious.
SS: Somehow I happened on her memoir Fifty Days of Solitude. She went to a cabin in Maine for fifty days and didn’t talk to anyone, cut off all contact. And she wrote this book about it. I just love the book. She’s published many novels over the years that I was never really interested in. She seemed like a fuddy-duddy type of writer, but then I was so thrilled by Fifty Days of Solitude that I went back and looked at her other books. She started writing the first of these memoirs as she was approaching age seventy. They’re very slim, and they’re all very much about aging and facing oblivion. She has a spiritual search and a sense of what it is to face oblivion, or death and aging and mortality. And there’s a kind of melancholia present, but she’s always reading. It’s like May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude. They knew each other. And in fact, in May Sarton’s diaries there’s this great moment where she’s like, Doris just sent me her Fifty Days of Solitude. It’s very interesting, when I’ve spent years in solitude, that she just spent fifty days.
BLVR: Competition.
SS: Yeah, about extreme solitude. I think May Sarton always lived alone, and Doris Grumbach had been married, raised four kids with a husband, and then left her husband and had a woman partner the rest of her life. They actually opened a bookstore in Maine, and then they both, in very old age, went to this Quaker retirement community. I like that she was always negotiating how to have such a rich, full life with her family. But she did this also knowing that always she had to return to the blank page and the space of emptiness. And it is actually a vocation, a spiritual act of facing the blank page and starting anew, as if you’ve never written before. The books about aging are fascinating to me. In the first she’s approaching seventy, and she’s bemoaning aging and how miserable it is. And a few years later, she writes another one. Two years later, another one. There are ten years of tiny books about facing death. She ends up living to one hundred and four. I love that that’s how it played out. To me, that part is much more exciting than her other books. I’m sure I would enjoy the novels, but I’m more interested in reading these spare, diaristic, memoirish books, all so loaded with everything she’s reading every day. To me, it’s another way of thinking about oblivion as a subject. And unlike with DFW, being forgotten isn’t the crisis. She isn’t concerned with that.
BLVR: It seems far more Zen. This idea of blankness and beginnings and their cyclical nature.
SS: I think that’s how he wanted to be, but he was not like that.
BLVR: It makes me think of To the Lighthouse and Mr. Ramsay, who bemoaned how he might not be remembered like Shakespeare. And how he wanted to get to R, but he was only at Q. That struck me as such a masculine need.
SS: Woolf’s father was probably that way, right? The reason I thought of Grumbach is because I pitched my next book as about reading these Doris Grumbach books. For me, at this stage of life, and with this huge transition of now being done with the parenting years—or at least having my life organized around it—I feel a deep engagement with her work.
Writers think about this. People read all those books about death and books written at the end of life, like When Breath Becomes Air [by Paul Kalanithi]. They’re hugely popular. So people want that news. That’s why I’m reading Doris Grumbach—because I want that news of living in that space for so long, of being aware of your mortality and being aware that this could be the end, not imminently, but at this time of life when you have more years behind you than ahead. I don’t know older women who speak so intimately about that, except to always complain about aging or just say how sad it is, which I realize it is.
BLVR: But also, maybe you want to be punk about aging.
SS: Exactly. It’s profound. It’s a profound experience of life, just like giving birth, or childhood, right? So what are other ways to approach it?
BLVR: Right, when put that way, it seems exciting.
IV. HER FIFTIETH YEAR
BLVR: I’ve been thinking about your second book, Her 37th Year, in the context of the spate of recent divorce books that Parul Sehgal classified in her New Yorker essay about Sarah Manguso’s Liars, “Is the End of Marriage the Beginning of Self-Knowledge?” And having read Miranda July’s All Fours recently, I think of the landscape it shares with Her 37th Year too—the homeostasis of a marriage that lacks desire, and writing about aging but not wanting to focus on menopause and mothering, or, rather, writing about aging and the end of a marriage as a fully sexual being. Your book touches on all these things but it’s—I wouldn’t say a refraction, but it’s not a straightforward, linear narrative. Obviously, that’s intentional. But the book, like July’s, is a fiction about approaching middle age, and all that comes with it as a woman aging in our society. It makes me want to quote Eileen Myles on resisting this sense of lamentation, and these female narratives that we’re given that are so dominant, and say, It’s not over yet!
SS: It’s so dominant and yet everywhere around us there are women living full, thriving lives after forty, after fifty. The mainstream narratives are really stupid and they just persist. I hear it all the time, and I hear it from my young students too. Like, Oh, she’s over thirty, and I’m just like, What!? I get that it’s relative, and they’ve never been thirty before. But it’s hammered into us in all directions. You and I have talked about The Substance and the fact that Demi Moore’s character, Elisabeth Sparkle, is fifty.
BLVR: She’s fired from her job hosting an aerobics show by the show’s older, male producer on her fiftieth birthday. He’s like, Good riddance—and she’s beautiful!
SS: That part of the movie made no sense to me. But in the last few weeks, I’ve heard two different stories about women and their fifties. One was in All Fours: the father’s mother jumped out the window when she turned fifty, because she didn’t want to get old. And then a few weeks before that, someone told me about a teacher they had, a Chinese woman who was sick with a chronic illness. Instead of treating it, she decided to go to Switzerland and do assisted suicide, in part because she didn’t want to age and she didn’t want to deal with losing her looks as she approached fifty. And to both these stories I was like, Damn, this just—
BLVR: That’s real avoidance.
SS: She broadcast it live. And she made a whole video talking about what she was doing and then broadcast it on social media while everybody was watching. And there’s all this chatter about it—people criticizing her, people admiring her. I had to keep saying, Wait! It was because she didn’t want to live past fifty? Like, OK. My life past fifty is so much better than my life before fifty, honestly. Not that things were miserable in my thirties and forties, but in many ways—in my headspace, in my awareness, my sense of who I am—it’s so nice.
BLVR: You come into yourself.
SS: Yes, to have all these references. I really appreciate you talking about Her 37th Year. I feel sad that nobody reads it. I’m happy people are reading Committed, and I think it’s awesome that people are reading Promising Young Women, but also in practical terms, they both have good distribution. It’s so frustrating to me, because I am really proud of Her 37th Year in a different way, and people just can’t buy it, because stores have a hard time stocking it, and it’s difficult to find through the usual online retailers.
BLVR: Well, people should order it directly from Noemi [Press] in support. Because Her 37th Year is a badass book about aging, not about refusing aging but really embracing it, and so aware. The narrator has reached some of the milestones she once thought would make her happy, and she’s realizing that it’s not enough. That no one thing is ever enough. Other desires creep in. It is so real.
SS: I guess this was the divorce book I didn’t write. It doesn’t end with divorce—but it was.
V. “I WAS TERRIFIED OF THE SIMPLER, EXPECTED ANSWER”
BLVR: Of your three books, Her 37th Year is the one steeped in longing and desire. I actually wanted to ask you about the form, because so much of your work utilizes fragmentation. Although there is a different logic to each book. In Her 37th Year, there is a very specific abecedarian type of container. Stylistically, I find it suits the sense of movement. I would love to hear you talk about fragmentation and if this modality reflects the ways you process narrative.
SS: I think it doesn’t. Her 37th Year didn’t start with the index. It came with revision. I sometimes try experiments of radical revision, like adding a wild form to a text to see what happens. In some of the stories—like in Promising Young Women’s “Constant Observation”—the structure allowed me to almost write mini-chapters within the numbered fragments.
I’ve taught creative nonfiction over the past many years, and I have read all sorts of essayists, including writers like Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine. I found their fragmentation—particularly Maggie Nelson’s in The Argonauts—very satisfying, because it allows her to jump around but each fragment is so specific. For me, the fragment is one among many types of organizational tricks and frames that help me write.
BLVR: The fragmentation I find in your writing lends it a certain acuity, or sharpness, that serves it well. In reading Committed, I sensed that the fragmentation reflected a part of the narrator’s experience, in that it reflects a fragmentation of identity and memory and a struggle to build a coherent self.
SS: The worst part about being young is that feeling. It’s also great, and it’s exciting because everything’s possible. But for me the worst part of it was that everything’s possible. You have to pick something—and then you lose everything else.
In Committed, there are a lot of gaps and jumps—grappling with larger ideas and conceptions about mental illness, and at times coming out of my experience. There were parts I felt I almost had to overwrite, that it wasn’t enough to leave the fragment. People bring their own experience and associations and then assume I’m speaking for everyone—and I’m not, you know? It’s just such a sensitive topic. So the fragment wasn’t going to be the whole thing. But I like the poetic style of the fragment, and I’m glad some sections could work in that way.
BLVR: The impossibility of language isn’t as palpable in Her 37th Year as it is in Committed. Language comes up as this burden, but it’s also the medium in which a writer works and creates. I’m curious about your struggles with language. I mean, actually, I don’t know if I should be asking a writer about their struggles with language…
SS: It’s why you’re a writer, right? [Laughs] That’s the role of a writer: someone for whom writing is a problem. I wanted there to be silences to be in Committed. There’s this genre of mental health narrative, and I felt I was working in it and working against it. Because people have all these expectations, and all the language around mental health and mental illness has been horrifying for me—it’s some of the worst language. But that’s why I love “The Depressed Person,” because that’s what DFW’s acknowledging there too.
Now we have more language to use and we want to reach people, which is important and necessary, but the language is also so offensive and stupid in so many ways that it creates its own problems. I wanted silences in the book that acknowledge that. I wanted to bring up questions about language and what’s missing, the inadequacy of it, without answering them.
And for me, too, the book was about bringing up what it means to have lived this mental health crisis, in this life, as this person who’s been called mentally ill, and what it means to introduce that without resolving it for the reader. Without saying, Well, now she’s better. Some of the book’s marketing pushed that. But I spent the last section of the book writing against that.
I hope readers understand that, for me, so much is about what could not be said. Paradoxically, I had to write more in that third section to say what can’t be said—in the language that we have available—about mental illness, about chemical imbalance, about before and after, and healing and recovery, the blah, blah, blah—all that. Exhaustively writing that last section was a way to say what I knew I couldn’t say, because I was terrified of the simpler, expected answer.
BLVR: Like the desire for closure, the happy ending.
SS: Yeah.
BLVR: You bring up the question—why can’t you just say something like, I need care, and then receive it? Obviously, we don’t have a system for that. But when put that way, it makes me wonder.
SS: I find the artists and young people in my creative writing classes are recognizing that language of care and using it with each other. It happened in a beautiful way in class, where my students often write about their own struggles, and we talk about reading each other’s work in terms of care. I don’t think that’s the default. It has to be built within a community of trust, and that takes a while. What’s most accessible is the medical model and its vocabulary. So there’s more talk like, I have a chemical imbalance, or, I have to go to the hospital, to the emergency room. It’s not that those things don’t save lives, because they do, but it imposes something else onto what is often just part of the experience of being human and what requires human interaction and interdependence and so on.
BLVR: It strikes me that what’s happening in your class, this care within a community, echoes what we need to do politically as well. If you’re going to the larger political institutions, then you’re dealing with the imposition of the institution.
SS: Exactly, as opposed to the local, and reflecting what people’s lives are truly like.
BLVR: I suppose it’s easy for me to say that it’s remarkable that you ended up spending so much time in a psychiatric ward just before it closed, a form of treatment that’s now seen as outdated. Toward the end of Committed, you describe a time twenty years after your time at NYSPI, when you saw a young doctor at a public clinic in Chicago for prescription refills, and she couldn’t believe that you had lived in a state-funded psychiatric institute for so long. That you had experienced that form of medicine.
SS: Right, of care.
BLVR: Of care.
SS: Because it was care. Again, that was also something that felt really important to acknowledge. I think so many people would benefit from what I experienced, and there are ways in which many people need that kind of care and will never get anything like it.
