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“Layered and lovely. . . . ”
—Vox, “The Best Books of the Year (So Far)”
“[An] affecting memoir. . . . If the hospital ward where Scanlon stayed felt at times like a “foreign country,” books served as a ballast for her fragile psyche.”
—The New Yorker
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About Suzanne
Suzanne Scanlon is the author of Committed (Vintage / Anchor Books), a critical memoir about women, reading, and mental illness. Committed was published in the UK by Two Roads Press, an imprint of John Murray. A Korean translation will be published by Bookhouse (Munhakdongne).
Scanlon’s previous books include Promising Young Women (Dorothy, 2012) and Her 37th Year, An Index (Noemi, 2015). The French translation of Promising Young Women was published by Les Editions du Portrait in March 2024, alongside another small book, “The Moving Target of Being” in Oct 2024. Her 37th Year, An Index was a best book of the year from Electric Literature. Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Kathleen Rooney described the book’s structure as “brilliant”: Her complex structure allows this book’s layers and textures to happen simultaneously, and to comment on themselves as they are happening. It shows that experience itself can be like a collage: not neatly linear, but full of overlaps and ragged edges.
Her 37th Year, An Index was featured in Martine Syms’ short film, shown at The Museum of Modern Art, and a Swedish translation was published in 2016. A chapter of Promising Young Women was featured as part of a group exhibition titled Institutional Garbage at Sector 2337, presented by the Green Lantern Press and the Hyde Park Art Center. A fiction, “The Rape Essay,” was published in Ireland, as part of A Kind of Compass, Stories on Distance (Tramp Press, 2015); “Skepticism and Affirmation” was published in Rockhaven: A History of Interiors (Which Witch) a book of photography and essays documenting the abandoned Rockhaven Sanitarium in La Crescenta, California.
Promising Young Women
“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
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.
Her 37th Year, An Index
HER 37TH YEAR, AN INDEX is the story of a year in one woman's life. Structured as an index, the work is a collage of excerpted conversations, letters, quotations, moments, and dreams. An exploration of longing and desire, the story follows a moment of crisis in a marriage and in the life of a woman who remains haunted by an unassimilable past. Allan Gurganus called an early version of the work a "thoroughly engrossing almanac of desire" when it was published by The Iowa Review.