Mistake House Magazine: Your first novel, Promising Young Women (2012), was published by Dorothy, a publishing project. You’ve described the process of working with Danielle Dutton, the co-founder of Dorothy, as “one of the most important experiences of [your] life.” How did you get involved with this feminist press, and what made the editorial experience so memorable?
Suzanne Scanlon: Danielle Dutton read a short story I published and asked if I had a manuscript. That story, “Ward Six,” became the opening of the book. It was a very collaborative process. It’s been many years now, but I remember she sent the original manuscript back to me with extensive suggestions for cuts and reordering. During the process of editorial back and forth, I wrote at least two new sections and created the ending which was not there. I’ve worked collaboratively in other art forms, notably the theater, but I didn’t know that an editor-author relationship could be that way, too. The book was very much developed out of her vision alongside my own. She also suggested cutting a few sections. I may have conceived of it as a story collection, but she saw it as a novel, each piece linked with an overarching narrative.
MH: Promising Young Women is a novel about a young woman, Lizzie, and her experiences in psychiatric institutions. The action begins in Ward Six, which reminded us of Chekov’s story, “Ward No. 6.” In that story, Dr. Andrey Yefimitch Ragin (the chief doctor of a mental asylum) has literary conversations with Ivan Dmitritch Gromov (a former civil servant committed to the asylum). In your novel, Lizzie has literary conversations not only with other patients in Ward Six, but also with the words of many writers: Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, to name a few. Were you thinking about Chekhov’s ward when you started writing Promising Young Women? Your ward, like Chekhov’s, is home to many writers and ideas, and it raises the question about who is mad—the writers in the ward, or the people outside?
SS: Yes, I was thinking about it back then, but it’s been a long time since I read that story. I can’t remember more than the title, but I’m glad it raises those questions. It’s obvious to anyone in a psych ward that the line is permeable, between the mad and the sane, and this idea persists throughout literature. It’s never been simple to define or set apart the mad. I do love the idea of a ward home to many writers and ideas, but in my memory of it wasn’t the most intellectually stimulating place to be. Luckily, when we write fiction, we can make things as we wish they were, or might have been.
MH: In your recent memoir, Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen (2024), you tell the story of your personal experience living and moving through psychiatric institutions when you were a university student in the 1990s. You have said that fiction and nonfiction are “constructs,” where “both take from life, and both invent” (BOMB Magazine). You have also noted that Promising Young Women can be perceived as both a “fictional memoir” and a “nonfictional novel.” Is it fair to say that “truth,” for you, is not found in the content of a piece of writing, but more in the act of writing?
SS: Yes, that’s a wonderful way to put it. Writing is an attempt to seek truth, regardless of genre category. That doesn’t mean that you don’t need to think about genre. Writing Committed was a project unlike writing Promising Young Women, even though the content was similar. Committed is marketed as a memoir, so I couldn’t make up events. In my other books, I made things up. Despite my interest in genre blurring, I do respect the contract with the reader. If I said I lived in a hospital from this year to this year, it better be true.
MH: In an interview with Hippocampus Magazine, you reflect on the loss of your mother to breast cancer when you were nine and discuss how literature became a means of processing grief: “The act of writing helps, but that doesn’t mean it ended my grief.” While your personal experiences with loss and institutionalization have shaped your writing, are there particular authors or individuals who have influenced your approach to exploring themes of loss and the female experience? Additionally, is there a threshold at which the intensity of a theme becomes overwhelming, and you need to step back or establish boundaries in your writing?
SS: Annie Ernaux. She is able to approach a threshold and yet maintain restraint. I love Sigrid Nunez’ recent books, for similar reasons. Both women write about loss and the female experience, particularly around aging and female sexuality and loneliness. Anne Carson and Clarice Lispector also come to mind.
Right now, I’m dealing with a health crisis, and it has made me think differently about mental health and writing. This is something I’m exploring in my new book, but I don’t have a model for it exactly. I wish I did.
MH: In Committed, you discuss how madness can be described as “the inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” and how for “many years of [your] life [you] had trouble sitting still.” Later you concede that “it is a combination of stillness and the single-minded focus that is necessary to write. To sit with a problem quietly in a room alone.” This implies that stillness, quietness, solitude, and a writing life create conditions for a sane existence. Is this why some chapters in Committed include “The Book as a Room” in the title? Do you have an ideal room to write in?
SS: Yes, this is a wonderful reading. I think so. It was intuitive but that’s exactly what I meant.
I wrote much of Committed at my dining room table. I’ve never had an ideal room to write in. A proper office. But I imagine having an office devoted to my writing. It would be a cottage, set a bit away from my home. A place I could go and be undisturbed, particularly in the morning. But that’s not an option right now and it’s ok! You have to be able to create a room of safety and freedom regardless of circumstances. That is part of what I meant by the metaphorical room.
MH: “Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.” — E. M. Cioran
“For some reason while I was peeing I thought about Lawrence of Arabia.” — David Markson (Wittgenstein’s Mistress)
These two quotes appear as epigraphs in Her 37th Year, An Index (2015). The quote by Markson seems to respond, playfully, to the quote by Cioran, as if the thought of Lawrence of Arabia while peeing is something one would never say out loud, and therefore perfect for a book. All of your books include epigraphs, and we are curious what role they play in your creative process, how much in conversation they are with your writing, and how you decide what epigraphs to use?
SS: I love the weird ways the body interferes with or provokes intellectual contemplation. The odd experience of having a mind and a body at once, with all of its demands and failures. Her 37th Year, An Index was partly about female desire. A desire that threatened to destroy the narrator’s life. She is always trying to intellectualize her experience and so even while peeing she is attuned to the life of her mind.
MH: You often use unconventional forms in your work. Her 37th Year, An Index, for example, is a novel told in the form of an index. Your short story, “Without You I’m Nothing,” is organized in lists under headings like “Stupid Questions,” “Syllabus,” and “Grace Paley.” You’ve spoken about how these forms, or “external structures,” are liberating because they don’t impose a “forced narrative” (BOMB Magazine). When you say “forced narrative,” are you talking about a traditional story with a beginning, middle, and end? What does a form like an index, as opposed to a narrative arc, offer the fiction writer and also the fiction reader?
SS: I’m not good at creating linear narratives. It’s a challenge for me. But as a way to work around that I discovered that books or stories can function like a collage. It doesn’t always work but those are two examples of fiction where I could tell the story without a chronological beginning, middle, and end. I have long been a fan of hybrid writing and books that work as a collage. Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely or Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. I also loved Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever which is a novel in fragments. Though there is a plot there’s also a lot that’s left out.
MH: Thinking more about the index form of Her 37th Year, An Index, you’ve spoken about how the sound of specific words, like “anecdote” or “boredom,” determined what words became titles in the index. What role does sound play in your writing process and word choices in general, and has your ear evolved across your writing career? This might be a question about how style meets form.
SS: Sound is very important. The sentences have to create a rhythm and the paragraphs have to hold shape. The ending of a paragraph or section needs to reach for something, particularly before the silence of a line break. It’s like poetry. My ear has absolutely evolved based on my reading and writing. You do come to have a certain voice, or that’s what we mean by voice, I think.
MH: For the letter “K” in Her 37th Year, An Index, you quote Chris Kraus: “I think that ‘privacy’ is to contemporary female art what ‘obscenity’ was to male art and literature of the 1960s. The willingness of someone to use her life as primary material is still deeply disturbing, and even more so if she views her own experience at some remove. There is no problem with female confession providing it is made within a repentant therapeutic narrative. But to examine things cooly, to thrust experience out of one’s own brain and put it on the table, is still too confrontational.” Your work contradicts these ideas—or lives by them: in Committed, for example, you examine your private lived experience in psychiatric wards “cooly” and put everything on the table. Could you talk about your decision to quote Kraus, and how you might be thinking about these ideas today, one year after the publication of Committed?
SS: Wow that’s interesting. Thank you for the connection. I haven’t thought of Kraus’ words in a while, but it’s quite apt. The marketing of Committed pushed the idea that it contained a repentant therapeutic narrative – but it really doesn’t. The entire third section of the book works against or pushes back on the idea of closure or recovery. I wanted to examine everything cooly, including the messy process of getting better, which doesn’t always look like getting better.
MH: In an interview with The Cut, you talk about how you’ve written against the idea of being defined by a diagnosis in your book Committed, yet diagnoses can sometimes offer connection and clarity. How have diagnoses been helpful or harmful in your life? How do you think about writing—or transforming—these diagnoses after you experience them?
SS: It’s important to be able to recognize depression so that you can get help. At this point in my life, I’m not afraid of diagnosis. When I was younger, they were too totalizing. I was too influenced by what someone said about me; it meant too much to me back then. Now I don’t place as much trust in what a psychiatrist has to say about my mental state. What I know to be true is more important. I know myself better. It’s a wonderful gift of aging—trusting yourself.
MH: Much of your work reflects on illness, prescriptions, and the definitions of madness imposed on people by the medical and psychiatric world. In a recent Substack post, you describe “the condition [of] writing, which is never simple or clear or consistent.” Would you say that writing is its own kind of condition? If so, how does writing compare to other conditions?
SS: Yes, it is. It can be a way of being in the world. An attempt to sort through experience and control it. I sometimes try to imagine living my life without the need to write about it. I can’t imagine it, I’m afraid. Something is missing. Maybe it is an attempt to make meaning. Maybe in that way it links to a depressive position. But in writing we give it meaning.
MH: Do you ever play hooky? If you do, what is your favorite thing to do when you take off suddenly, as in a dérive?
SS: Often. I walk to the lake or buy myself some special food, like ice cream. I’ve been searching about for the right form for my current project, and it was on one of these walks—playing hooky—that I found myself at the lake. It starts as an imperative: I live so close to a lake but can go for days without seeing it. And then the minute I see it something opens up. Possibility. A release from the limitations of self. I realized in one of these walks that my new book will be a sequel to Her 37th Year, An Index. I needed the walk and the lake to suggest this.