Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women, Dorothy, a publishing project, 2012.
A series of fragmentary tales tells the story of Lizzie, a young woman who, in her early twenties, unexpectedly embarks on a journey through psychiatric institutions, a journey that will end up lasting many years. With echoes of Sylvia Plath, and against a cultural backdrop that includes Shakespeare, Woody Allen, and Heathers, Suzanne Scanlon’s first novel is both a deeply moving account of a life of crisis and a brilliantly original work of art.
“Suzanne Scanlon enters the inverted space of grief and near-madness with courage, intelligence, and wit—and with a small, sharp light for us to follow.” - dawn raffel
“About ten lives occur in this very short novel. One swiftly becomes the background of the next, then that one looms up fast and for a moment you think oh this is the life. And it is ending. I like the swift consciousness with which Suzanne Scanlon orchestrates all of it and even more I admire the true (and maneuvered) intimacy that holds me here on the page despite the fact that inside and out of this volume of Promising Young Women there are so many of us, lives, and women and female writers. You wonder if we matter at all and Suzanne Scanlon says in a multitude of quietly intelligent and felt ways that we do, helplessly, all of us do, no matter.” - eileen myles
“In pitch-perfect prose, Suzanne Scanlon has given us wonderful Lizzie—smart, brave, and, at the same time, so scared stiff by her young life that that she winds up on a psych ward run by Dr. Roger, whose specialty is 'troubled, pretty girls.' Promising Young Women digs deep and speaks to us all about how we compose our individual lives in the wilds of modern times.” - elizabeth evans
“If Scanlon had employed the strategies of conventional realism, these troubling but utterly convincing stories of life in and out of psych wards would be mere bathos. Written through the liveliest sort of formal invention, they acquire real force and authority. The reader is driven before the story like something driven before a wave. And that is a deeply pleasurable feeling.” curtis white
“The voice, or voices, in Suzanne Scanlon’s Promising Young Women are sly, tragic, knowing, wounded, and brave. This wholly original novel is a wonderfully refreshing addition to the many stories that tell us the news of women’s grief, rebuilding, coming to terms.” - mary gordon
The promise of the young women of this debut novel-in-fragments has little to do with education or career; it’s that, despite their diagnosis as “Hypervigilants/Super-Sensitives,” they might get better and get out of mental hospitals. But before that, there’s life on the ward (and snippets of life before and after), as reported by our guide, Lizzie, both of the “Long Term Ward” and not of it: a “Classic Depressive,” she’s tried to kill herself, but having recognized the dangerously seductive quality of the “liminal state” of mental illness and the risk of becoming a “career patient,” she somehow makes it to the other side. We don’t hear much about how she does that, although Lizzie’s self-awareness is clearly part of it. Scanlon, an actress and academic, is more interested in depicting the way the drugs get stronger, time elapses, and a young, bright female, a cutter, a burner, a binger, anorexic, or screaming or refusing to talk, starts to think of herself as “sick or mad or mentally ill.” Lizzie’s likable, as are her wised-up fellow passengers on what they call the S.S. Roger—and if we’re less invested in her and more in the depiction of this specifically female milieu where having read Sylvia Plath and Girl Interrupted doesn’t protect against the effects of “complicated grief” or its cure, that may be Scanlon’s intent. Agent: Malaga Baldi, the Baldi Agency. - Publishers Weekly
The moment I opened Suzanne Scanlon's Promising Young Women on the beach over the summer, a young couple not far me started arguing. The girl told the boy he had been unsympathetic, not in his actions, but in his words. And then I heard her (belly ring, cut-offs, killer figure) offer this: "I'm sorry that I said that, because I don't think I said that at all." I still hadn't read a word of Scanlon, and before I could, I wrote down that young girl's sentence at the bottom corner opposite the first page. I had no idea how fitting it would turn out to be, like a preface.
Scanlon's main character, Lizzie, does not trust language: "Language ruins everything: thought and impressions and each particular sensation." But it becomes clear it's only her own she doesn't trust. In the opening chapter, she is a patient in a psych ward, an event that happened "a long time ago." Her doctors require her to write: "Writing in the notebooks filled me up and calmed me down: the world was something I created. Which made it less terrifying. Even if the words were not my own. Especially if the words were not my own." From the beginning, Scanlon (and her protagonist) are aware of how language (not ours, but others') manipulates reality - we are so tuned into the worlds of Others that we lose ourselves. Or we can't figure out why our reality is not like the one in the book, on TV, the stage, in the dark theater. In one chapter, Lizzie goes on a two-page rant about Friends: "I wondered how all the patients could watch the Friends without feeling completely betrayed and deeply sad and even more alone than they must already feel." Scanlon's narrative involves a postmodern, end-of-twentieth-century Jenga tower of allusions.
To add to that (dis)allusion layering, Lizzie is an aspiring actress, spending her time pretending not to be a character, but the way the character was played by another actress, such as Shelley Winters, or Meryl Streep, or Patti Smith in "that Sam Shepard one-act about a lobster." Eventually she's asked to read not for a part she wants, but for another, a woman who slurs and has difficulty standing (very Lizzie-esque). Her director's direction: "Just don't act." It's an important moment in the narrative, because what these Promising Young Women seem to be struggling with is how to have a voice in a world that doesn't have a part for them to play. Or, how, in a "very post-Cuckoo's Nest, but also even post-Girl Interrupted, which maybe hadn't been published yet," everything seems to be post-something. And where can a girl find an identity in that?
Scanlon illuminates the way young women struggle to find their reflections in contemporary culture and society (pre-ABC Family Network). Here's how far Lizzie goes: There are (at least) thirty allusions to writers (Chekhov, Stein, Plath), actors (Streep, Winona Ryder, Marilyn Monroe), books (Beloved, As I Lay Dying, Walden), and films (Heathers, Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Misfits). In a small-sized book of only 160 pages, the literary-pop-theoretical roulette can be dizzying. On a narrative level, the use of allusions can be justified by Lizzie's love of the language she trusts: "not her own." Yet there's another level, perhaps of a writer who has yet to separate her world from her character's. For a reader, it can be like a game of Jeopardy! in which you pat yourself on the back for catching an allusion, "My mother is a fish." ("Who is Vardaman?"), but not one crosses the complexity border to intertextuality.
Beyond the allusion-laden narrative, Scanlon's prose is experimental. Her work is a collection of vignettes that alter in point of view, structure (lists, sections, dream sequences), and time (then and now and before then). One of my favorite chapters, "Girls in Trouble," is metafictive ("Here is the rising action." "Here is the climax.") and in second person directed to (Lizzie's?) boyfriend: "You won't call her your girlfriend, even after she calls you her boyfriend." I see these second-person narratives often enough that I have labeled them "ironic instruction narratives" because they invariably explain in a "how-to" something no one would want to (or should) experience. Overall, the altering points of view create a persona sleight of hand akin to Abigail Thomas's Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life. It's as if the character is unable to commit to a self or perceives the self as Other ("Who is Hegel?").
Perhaps it's clear now that I have been unable to commit to calling Scanlon's work anything beyond a narrative. The Dorothy Project, the independent press that published Promising Young Women is described on its website as being "dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction." While Promising Young Women is labeled as a novel, it reads like a memoir. Beyond biographical overlaps (both Scanlon and her protagonist attended Barnard, acted, performed in a revival of Hatful of Rain, lived in New York City), the voice is immediate, intimate, the work more essayistic, searching. Yes, fiction can do all of this, too, but I'd call Scanlon's work both "near fiction" and "about fiction." Or maybe, like that young woman on the beach ("I don't think I said that at all"), Scanlon allows Lizzie to rely on words that are "not her own." - Jill Talbot
“I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity. “ —Sylvia Plath, “Elm” (in Ariel)
“This wasn’t like in the movie Heathers, which had come out a few years earlier. We watched it over and over again. It was something we did. Back then, I hadn’t read Ariel. In the movie, Ariel is a punchline; Sylvia Plath is a joke. This was before I’d learned that Sylvia Plath was real, not a joke.—Suzanne Scanlon, Promising Young Women
Suzanne Scanlon’s Promising Young Women is a novel-in-fragments that doesn’t wear its influences and inspirations lightly. The author’s note acknowledges that the book uses lines and images from The Bell Jar and Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, and although there is one significant chapter/story towards the end that refers to the latter, the book is largely haunted by the spirit of Plath.
Promising Young Women quietly and discreetly echoes The Bell Jar, but is also in conversation with it. If Plath’s only novel was a searing and caustic portrait of white middle-class female sadness in the ‘60s, then Scanlon’s debut is a sensitive and troubling portrait of white middle-class female sadness in the ‘00s. The book as a physical object—published by Dorothy, the Publishing Project—is very much like the women Scanlon writes about: it’s beautiful and elegant, with a lovely cover that somehow evokes melancholy without revealing too much. Intensely personal and pared down—the stories in this book are moods, feelings, thoughts, and experiences observed in close detail—Promising Young Women looks back at The Bell Jar and seems to say, Dear Sylvia, Everything has changed but nothing, really, has changed.
Promising Young Women
“The other thing was that I’d discovered I was a cipher.
‘I am an empty thing. A fragmented mutating subject.’
‘No, you just feel that way,’ they told me.
‘What’s the difference?’”
Language is a trap for Lizzie, yet writing calms her down because “the world was something I created.” Scanlon’s use of language is so light and deft, almost given to aphorism—there were so many short phrases and pithy quotes that I had to keep scribbling down in a notebook—but it becomes clear that for Lizzie (and perhaps for everyone who ever needed to write), language can be harnessed, modified, manipulated, and writing can be salvaged as a form of power.
As Helene Cixous writes in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, “To begin (writing, living) we must have death,” and Lizzie is, in fact, always thinking about her mother’s death, even when she’s not. Lizzie’s destabilisation doesn’t happen on the page; her life is one long process of destabilisation, aided and abetted by the institutions of the psychiatry industry. On the page is where she rearranges the pieces, or sifts through the detritus to make sense of her world by creating new or different worlds. In one of her dreams, for instance, Lizzie sees herself in a group meeting, speaking up in a way she never actually does in her waking life:
“‘There is an instability of knowledge!’ She has raised her voice now; she is nearly screaming. ‘It’s terrifying!’ The group leader lifts an eyebrow, looks around the room. The others don’t say anything. In the dream she is articulate and focused. She is all language and all voice, in a way that she never was.”
My favourite segments from the book include “Girls in Trouble”, “Constant Observation”, and “All That You Aren’t But Might Possibly Be”. These stories are experimental exercises in metafiction, a play on conventional storytelling forms that places the reader on unstable ground: Just who is doing the talking here, you wonder, just who is telling this story?
Promising Young Women is filled with a multiplicity of voices, which seems fitting considering that Lizzie goes on to become an actress (much like Scanlon herself). Acting, like writing, becomes for Lizzie a way out of her own voice, or maybe a way into the voices of others, or perhaps just a way of having all the voices in her head speak their lines and have their say, which is probably why Oscar Wilde is quote in the book: “I love acting. It is so much more real than life.”
Like Plath before her, Scanlon is merciless in interrogating how promising young women are produced, reconfigured, and then recast as troubled young women by institutions heavily-invested in ensuring that “career patients” continue to exist. “Career patients” is a term that Lizzie discovers is part of the bureaucratic-speak of psychiatry: it refers to people who “were hooked on their illness, on the idea of being sick, on the idea of suicide.”
In a chapter that references James Joyce’s “The Dead”, Lizzie has an epiphany: “The recognition that she was becoming a career patient. That she had to stop trying to kill herself. Or that she had to kill herself. But that she could no longer live in this liminal state and spend days or weeks in woodsy hospitals where everyone spoke in acronyms and watched Friends. That this was far worse than death.”
Scanlon isn’t explicit about the connections between capital and psychiatry, the veritable industry of exploitation of pretty, young, sad women—but her earliest, foundational experience of institutionalisation is onboard what she calls the “S. S. Roger”, a ward created by a man who specialised in fixing—or perhaps (un)fixing—promising young women such as herself, and how much of this “promise” is located in a young woman’s physical appearance and exteriority; how much of value is accrued to the appearance of beauty. “You are attractive. That matters,” Roger tells her, and that this meant that she was worthy of investment: “That I had enough going for me to make it worth it for them to bother.”
Scanlon’s constant references to pop culture and books and films—“Ugh” is a clever chapter that begins with a Molly who “refused” to get out of bed, a bedroom Bartleby—underpin even the most complicated passages in a book that only comes up to about 155 pages. Essentially, it’s A Portrait of a Young Woman Shaped by Pop Culture. Scanlon isn’t just interested in showing how a young American woman of the 21st century relates to, and mediates, much of the world through the stuff she’s heard, and seen, and read, but also in how art is shaped and made through this mediation, a sum of all things that have touched you and stayed with you throughout your life.
The formal invention and stylistic sophistication of Promising Young Women allows Scanlon to show how this is done: early on, Lizzie meets a fellow patient who jokes about her attempt to drown herself by attributing it to “a bad day”; later on, Lizzie succeeds in an acting class where she has to play a woman who sticks her head in the oven by incorporating this line. It’s a quiet but illuminating insight into the process of creation; a bit of a cliché perhaps, but true all the more because of it: life feeds art, art feeds life, and skulking around at the edges is death, always death.
I cringe a little to talk of hope, because I’m never really sure where hope is meant to go, but the meaning of accumulated affects, feelings, and experiences are pretty much summed up in the book’s ending note, where Lizzie recollects a few of her favourite things. As such, I would say that Promising Young Women ends on a hopeful note, but the sadness has found no resolution. The problem of emotions still has not been solved:
“What she did not know was that Prozac would lead to Zoloft would lead to Ativan would lead to Mellaril would lead to Halcion. Would lead to hypnosis and shocks and lots groups named with acronyms. She did not know that the week would turn into a month or that the month would turn into an interview with Roger, who ran the famous Institute. It all just sort of happened. She did not know there would be consequences. No one spoke of stigma—and jot just societal stigma, the kind you internalize, the kind Woolf internalized, which wasn’t romantic after all—the way you come to think of yourself as sick or mad or mentally ill. Loony or bonkers or someone with emotional problems. Which is how they put it these days. As if. Aren’t all emotions problems? she wondered.”
Some of the promising young women, like Lizzie, might “make it”, somehow, but many do not. And what of the unpromising, the ugly, the poor, the not-young; the countless many on whom the bell jar descends over and over? The only thing that seems to be certain is that the Rogers and the institutes of the world will continue to proliferate. - Subashini Navaratnam
Promising Young Women by Suzanne Scanlon. This book consist of a series of narrative fragments, somewhat like Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, and like the Johnson book it has one foot in the realm of short story and the other in the world of the novel. There is one character, named Lizzie, and we follow her through a shifting, non-chronological account of a time earlier in her life when she was so severely depressed she was institutionalized in the Rockland State Psychiatric Institute. Yet the book, despite the similarities with Jesus’ Son, is by no means a copy of that novel. (I’m not saying this as a criticism of Johnson, whose work I love, but as a criticism of the countless Johnson-like stories and books that came out after Jesus’ Son and that all too often felt like pale imitations of that earlier work.) The pieces that make up this book give a wonderful account of being young and creative and out-in-the-world for the first time, and, to me at least, the best parts are those that relate how Lizzie maneuvered through her world before and just after institutionalization. In “Mount St. Helens,” we get a glimpse of Lizzie as a young girl watching her mother slowly die in a hospital; in one of my favorite stories (or chapters), entitled “All That You Aren’t But Might Possibly Be,” we see Lizzie in the first weeks after being released from Rockland, trying out for a part in a play and getting hit by a car in the process; and in “Am I Blue?” we see the narrator in her dorm room calmly swallowing pill after pill, her tone no more emotional than if she were writing a term paper. In fact, “Am I Blue?” is the last story in the book, and the implication is that this is the suicide attempt that leads to Lizzie winding up in Rockland. Because it closes the novel, it gives the entire book a circular feel, as if time has secretly been tugging us backward through the narrative.
Another element I like about this book is how it openly wears its influences on its sleeve, and yet never in a coy, Gosh-I’m-smart manner. The moving ending is a clear reference to the famous ending in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, where Allen’s Isaac Davis talks about his list of favorite things while speaking into a tape recorder. In Scanlon’s scene, Lizzie and her friend Dread make a list of their own favorite things shortly after meeting each other in Los Angeles. The fact that Lizzie references Allen elsewhere suggests that she had internalized Allen’s film, or rather that she uses Allen’s narrative to frame her own narrative. Scanlon has Lizzie do the same with Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illych in the chapter “The Other Story.” Here certain elements from the Russian novella (the syllogism on mortality, the black sack) are re-employed by Lizzie to speak about her mother’s death. But no grand statements about authorship, etc., seem to be implied. Rather, Scanlon’s use of Allen, Tolstoy, Plath and others, suggests that we all pick up narratives here and there, and that we use these narratives to create our own. Art is always infused with life, and vice versa. By having art intermingle with life so casually and subtly, Scanlon’s use of outside narratives (Allen’s, Tolstoy’s, etc.) is more subversive than those novels and stories that have their sources displayed with bright neon letters since those bright neon letters windup reinforcing the divide between art and life even as they claim to undermine it. Scanlon’s book takes place in a space that is already beyond the poles of authenticity and inauthenticity. - James Pate
from Promising Young Women : Heather
This wasn’t like in the movie Heathers, which had come out a few years earlier. We watched it over and over again. It was something we did. Back then, I hadn’t read Ariel. In the movie, Ariel is a punchline; Sylvia Plath is a joke. This was before I’d learned that Sylvia Plath was real, not a joke. Heathers made suicide glamorous but also made fun of the glamor. What I remember most is the way Winona Ryder said I don’t really like my friends. It was perfect: sexy and sad. It was how we all felt back then.
This Heather wasn’t a Heather, though. She wasn’t a Veronica, either.
And this Heather wasn’t Scandinavian, though when I think of her I always think of Bergman, of the grainy film in black and white. The actress. The nurse. I first watched it while visiting Dread at Sarah Lawrence. He locked me in one of the library viewing rooms. You have to see this, he said.
For the rest of my life, the men I loved or would love—it was always this way:
You must read/see/listen to/think about this.
And I would. Read or watch or listen or think. It was one way of becoming the person I wanted to be.
Heather was pretty in a simple way, what people think of when they say wholesome. Which is a word I hate. The kind of girl all the guys wanted to date in high school. Which was not me. Heather was a cheerleader and her boyfriend was a football player. Joe.
Heather didn’t talk. That was her thing. She’d been in the hospital a year and a half and hadn’t said a word.
I found her absolutely riveting.
Heather walked. There wasn’t far to go so she’d walk the halls, the corridors, up and down over and over again. Daily.
It is a way of dying, not talking. I hadn’t realized.
Those first weeks I spent my days mostly just watching Heather walk up and down the halls of the Unit, her thick brown ponytail swinging as she walked. She had a body like Marilyn Monroe’s—the large, round gorgeous body of Monroe in The Misfits. Which is my favorite. I hid my body under my sweatshirts; Heather wore tight t-shirts and short shorts. She was utterly uninhibited, except for the not-speaking part, I guess. She walked with perfect posture and because of this I associated her with a sort of freedom that felt impossible.
This association, of course, said a lot more about my relationship to my own body than it did about Heather. Who knows how she felt about her desired body? Did it feel like something separate from herself, as it did for me? I didn’t think so. It was her voice that needed disciplining. Her body—that was something else, something alive in a way she would not be.
Heather always wore her Walkman as she walked. She listened to Mary J. Blige.
Walking is thinking, Gertrude Stein wrote. But for Heather, I’m pretty sure walking was not thinking.
Every day I sat on the vinyl couches watching Heather. One day, as she passed, she smiled at me. Just for a moment. She then looked straight ahead again, her chin up, her posture straight. I can still see her walking, her effortless grace. Most of the women on the S.S. habitually slouched or tried otherwise to make their bodies disappear. To take up less space. Heather didn’t have these hangups; only her voice had come to seem like too much of herself in the world.
I admired her for it. Language is a betrayal, after all. Or so I believed in those days. Or so I still believe.
One day I worked up the courage to ask Heather if I might join her.
“Would you mind?”
She shook her head.
I smiled, blushed. I ran to get my own Walkman and running shoes. I joined Heather, who was waiting by the nurses’ station.
We walked the halls of the S.S. Lyle. It became a regular thing. Day after day on the floor of the ward, we walked together and alone, side by side, not talking; each wearing our Walkman as we walked from one end of the women’s dorm to the other: down the main hall and past the nurses’ station, past the smoking room and the kitchen, past the elevators and the television room, all the way to the men’s dorm in the south end of the ward—which wasn’t really a dorm at all but rather a designated space spanning about four rooms, though there were never more than two men on the ward at any given time–toward the back hallway full of doctor’s offices and meeting rooms. We followed this route, back and forth, for an hour or more each day. When we reached the eastern end of the hall of the women’s dorm, or the eastern end of the hall of north offices, we’d stand for a moment in the bright sunlight that hit that window most intensely and then pivot around, taking the step that set us back again west, toward the elevators, the kitchen, the Aides station, the front sitting room where few patients or visitors ever sat.
That light coming through the window always reminded me of something hopeful and sad, some hard-to-place thing.
It was one way of passing time.
Walking is thinking, I wrote to Dread.
I thought walking was walking, he wrote back, from Prague.
“This is a good addiction,” Lyle told me approvingly, “it may be compulsive, exercise can be addictive—but it has positive results, so we want to encourage it.”
Heather had been a cheerleader, I was a pom-pom girl. One thing we knew how to be was pleasing. Without realizing it exactly, we sought the approval of authority figures, which, in the context of the S.S., meant the approval of doctors, nurses, staff.
Everyone on the ward was being observed, of course; some just found this more gratifying than others. It was maybe more complicated than that, but easy enough to spot: girls who were used to getting attention. Maybe too used to it. Maybe we didn’t know what to do without it.
Heather listened to a variety of music, most of which I didn’t like. I liked Tori Amos.
“She’s too whiny,” Heather said one day, and then smiled.
It was the second full sentence I heard her say.
We could only agree on Madonna. All of the white girls on the ward loved Madonna, Les noted, except for her. She was proud of it.
It meant something, Les declared, all that Madonna love, without explaining what she thought it meant.
I told Mary, my favorite, that I didn’t care what Les said; Madonna made me happy, at least in a momentary superficial way.
“You’ve got to take what you can get in this world, doll. There’s not much more to it than that.” Mary would say, laughing. I loved that laugh.
Lyle believed in certain things. I wondered if Heather believed in Lyle’s belief. I wanted to ask her. But it wasn’t possible to have a conversation with Heather, and that in itself became extremely comforting to me. As much as possible, I wanted to live within Heather’s world of silence.
But the thing about Heather: she got better.
This was especially notable because very few women aboard the S.S. Lyle made anything like linear progress during their stay. Even Denise O’Byrne, discharged after three years, had the same defensively angry expression and tendency to violent outburst that she’d always had, at least that’s how it seemed to me and the other patients. Iris Hernandez cut her thin arms just as regularly, if not more often, as her discharge date approached. Heather—who was neither violent nor a cutter—was different. She came in silent, stone-faced, removed; over the years, she blossomed. She smiled, laughed—at first a little, and then later as a regular thing. She started talking. She told jokes. And then she talked a lot. She even talked about how she had gotten better–the rest of us were far too nervous to acknowledge something like this, even if it was true, for all sorts of deep-seated and complicated psychic reasons. Also because mostly we didn’t believe it was possible to get better. Heather did, though. She still had her bad days, her bad moods; but, for the most part, Heather changed. She wasn’t happy, exactly, but she was there in a way she hadn’t been for years. Looking at her; well, you almost believed in the place.
I can’t say how it happened and it turned out that I hadn’t even seen Heather at her worst, since she’d been there over a year already when I arrived. At her worst, so Annie told me, and Heather agreed, she didn’t even smile. She wouldn’t have noticed me watching her, wouldn’t have acknowledged another human being. At her worst, she was pretty much gone. Which is why her mom had driven her down to New York City from their inconveniently located home in rural New Hampshire to meet with the famous doctor who a friend of a friend had heard good things about. He sounded like just the doctor to treat Heather, the friend told Heather’s mom.
And Heather was pretty, the friend said. She’d heard that his hospital specialized in treating pretty young girls.
Heather’s mom was skeptical (and frankly a little wary of a doctor who focused on curing pretty girls) but Heather’s not talking had scared the hell out of her, really. She had no idea that her daughter could do such a thing. It revealed a power she didn’t think her child possessed. She didn’t think she herself possessed that power, to be honest. There was a small part of her—she didn’t tell Lyle this—that envied her daughter. She only remembered the small part when Heather did it (stopped talking); she remembered her own desire, as a young girl, to shut everything out, to refuse, to say no.
Thank you, but no. I’d prefer not to.
She couldn’t do it, of course. It was impossible. Her own mother wouldn’t have noticed even if she had done it, likely. And so she had gone along with it all, had married Heather’s dad, had two children, had left Heather’s dad and managed to raise the two children on her own, without much help. Rarely did she stop to consider it all now. She didn’t have time. And so when her daughter—pretty, sweet, a cheerleader with a nice enough boyfriend, a football paper who first spotted Heather cheering on the sidelines—refused to talk, she was brought back to that time, that younger version of herself, that moment when the thought had occurred to her, too: the thought that she had a choice, that it was all a choice.
She’d read an interview with Meryl Streep, her favorite actress, some months earlier. Streep was asked how she would spend her perfect day, if she had the choice.
“If I had the choice,” the actress replied, “I wouldn’t do anything. But I don’t have a choice.”
Heather’s mother had been moved by that, deeply moved to realize that her favorite actress of all time felt the way she herself did, at least some of the time, when it came down to it. And that’s what she wanted to tell Heather (but never would, because you can’t tell children such things, they have to learn it on their own):
“I don’t have a choice. And neither do you.”
And so when I started walking with Heather, it was already happening. There was a change underway. As I walked and looked daily to the light that showed me a way while also forbidding it, something in Heather was shifting. As I became more aware of what the light forbid, Heather remembered the power of a smile. The day she first spoke to me, who hadn’t yet heard her voice, she laughed and then said,
“I’m going to tell Joe not to come anymore.”
I took off my earphones then. I looked at Heather. Joe visited every Sunday, usually with Heather’s mom and brother. The two of us, who were technically women, walked down the hall, looking straight ahead. As we passed the Aides station, William, just coming on shift, held up his hand. Heather slapped him a high-five and as she did, let out another laugh that could be described as carefree. Which is another word I hate. William smiled. We kept walking, down and around the nurses’ station and then back into the girl’s dorm, until we reached the end of the hallway where the midday light shone hard against the thick barred windows.
Suzanne Scanlon, Her 37th Year: An Index, Noemi Press, 2015.
Halfway through the “D” chapter of Suzanne Scanlon’s Her 37th Year: An Index, the narrator – a nameless female writer living in New York – says in defiance of a friend: “I want to deny the arch.” The friend had called her a “hot mess”, and though the narrator agreed with the assessment, she was disturbed by its underlying power to instantaneously sum up her life. “I want to be punk about aging,” the narrator says. “Punk about gooey mothering, punk about turning thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty.”
Aversion to narrative is central to the conceit of Scanlon’s book, which eschews narrative altogether, its text instead organised into an alphabetical list of words and phrases and proper nouns. Each entry is paired with an associated account, a kind of psychological ‘record’ or definition that floats freely across time and space, drawing on the narrator’s memories, dreams, conversations, letters, quotations, and various cultural ephemera (including literature, film, TV, news, online obituaries, Southwest Airline ads, Facebook and Tumblr posts) — from chapter “E”:
END, THE (see also: Healing), “You are not finished,” she assures you. It would be easier to be finished, you often think. You have thought.
and:
HUSBAND, who will call. “I miss you,” you will say. “I love you,” you will say. “I want to move back to New York,” you will say. He will either not hear you or he will ignore you. “I have to get some work done,” he will say. “We can talk tomorrow,” he will say. “Goodnight. Love you.” “Goodnight.”
Amid the torrent of language, there are fleeting glimpses of mini-narratives and quasi-characters, such as the narrator’s marriage to a nameless “husband”, the raising of her child (named “Magoo”), affairs with “B—” and “the man in boots”, and her childhood friendship with a “tall, beautiful, old money East Coast” girl named Marigold. But even these stories are broken down into atoms, their narrative arcs barely decipherable, the timing and intersection of events left vague and open to interpretation.
As the reader sifts through entry after entry, the index gradually reveals itself as an extended and complicated self-meditation. The narrator is approaching that dreaded age where “suddenly every book is about turning [40]”. She feels the contours of well-worn archetypes forming around her in an almost suffocating way. Ruminating on memories of past milestones, like the day of her college graduation, she recalls suffering from a visceral “fear of endings”. Her urge to resist narrative is partly a deflection of her inherent mortality, a lesson she is learning to accept, as quoted in the entry for “DISAPPOINTMENT” (from George Orwell’s 1984): “The end is contained within the beginning.”
Her resistance also portrays a kind of narrative vertigo, the feeling that she is unable to assign a “beginning” or “end” to many of her life experiences. Quoting poet Claudia Rankine, she says, “It occurs to [her] that forty could be half my life or it could be all my life.” The narrator can’t decide whether her marriage is not working because she is depressed, or if she is depressed because her marriage is not working. She wonders about “the difference between destruction and construction”. Her jumbled mind envies how Marigold “[knows] how to be in the world in a way [she does] not,” the way Marigold resembles “an entire composition”, while the narrator feels like a “[collection of] fragments.”
Scanlon’s decision to use an index-style form is both a way to assuage the prospect of death, and more closely mimic her narrator’s messy conceptions of the world and herself. The project is similar in spirit to Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, which also centres around a nameless female writer approaching middle-age, her vast palette of thoughts and stories and remembered cultural references organised into a numbered, episodic structure. Both narrators are confused and anxious and obsessed with teasing out the relationship between life and art.
“WHERE ARE WE IN TIME AND SPACE?” Offill’s narrator angrily scribbles on the story drafts of her writing students.
“DO NOT CONFLATE NARRATOR W/ AUTHOR,” Scanlon’s narrator writes on a student essay.
These books are rigid in form but almost infinitely expansive in substance. The narrational “consciousness” can (and does) take us wherever she pleases, as long as it adds a useful dimension to the subjects or themes under consideration: life and death, art and love, desire and rejection. Complicating this approach even further are the playful ways that each narrator portrays the physical world, as if communicating through a kaleidoscope of perspectives. Halfway through Dept. of Speculation, the narration mysteriously switches from “I” and “we,” to “the wife.” The various entries in Her 37th Year alternate between third-, second- and first-person. This messy, multi-faceted narration acknowledges the fact that our internal dialogues often address many different audiences, real and imagined, from our loved ones and acquaintances, to our former and possible selves.
The artistic ethos underlying such formally experimental texts closely mirrors that of David Shields’ genre-bending manifesto Reality Hunger (2010), in which he argues for new collage-style forms of literature that explore big themes and topics using any and every available method, regardless of formal attribution or canonical classifications (he has described genre as “a minimum security prison”). Shields’ mandate to his literary peers is to create “art with a visible string to the world”, texts that help the reader better understand “how … the writer solve[d] being alive”.
One laudable example that Shields often cites is Gregory Burnham’s ‘Subtotals’ (from Harper’s Magazine, July 1989). This short piece takes the form of a back-of-the-napkin calculation, the narrator tallying up his life’s many experiences, such as number of broken bones (0), houses rented (12), times unfaithful to wife (2), stairs walked up and down (745,821, 743,609), etc. Similar to Scanlon’s index-style structure, part of the beauty embedded into Burnham’s piece is the juxtaposition of a logical form filled with human subjectivity. His narrator reveals himself through the miscellaneous subjects deemed personally important enough to categorise, from “states visited (38)” to “number of gray hairs (4)”.
The collage of ideas that make up Her 37th Year build toward an argument that more important than narrative is the pure sense of being somewhere – anywhere – in communion with another human soul. The index entry for “COMMUNICATION” quotes playwright Tony Kushner: “The individual is a myth. The lowest reducible unit of humanity is two.” The narrator recalls reading somewhere that “it takes two to be ill: patient and doctor”, and she fondly remembers an adolescent crush on her psychiatrist, their weekly sessions an attempt to “bridge the gap, the horror of separateness”. These sentiments seem to be directly channeling Shields’ desire for more artistic “visible string[s] to the world”.
The book does have one roughly decipherable, overarching narrative: the narrator’s gradual ascent towards a heightened emotional maturity, a lesson that bookends the text. Her mindset evolves from a declaration of personal defiance in the opening paragraph (“this is not about you”) to an enlightened plea for communion in the final sentence (“I really need you with me in this story”). Based on the opening paragraph, the “you” could be referring to her husband, “the man in boots”, or another nameless, long-lost lover from one of her past lives. Or could it be a direct reference to the reader, the person on the other side of the manuscript, that she has learned is necessary to bring her story to life?
In one of the book’s early scenes, the narrator describes a play about a prisoner who scratches on the wall of his cell. This image is invoked as a metaphor for life and art, a poignant summary of what we do during our brief moments here on Earth: “one scratch[es] on the wall”. If it is impossible for any single person to reckon directly with the universe, the best we can do is attempt to confide in the people around us, those who represent our fellow cosmic travellers. - Matt King
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