Synopsis
‘Dazzlingly and daringly written’ Rachel Cooke, Observer
W-3 is a small psychiatric ward in a large university hospital, a world of pills and passes dispensed by an all-powerful staff, a world of veteran patients with grab-bags of tricks, a world of dishevelled, moment-to-moment existence on the edge of permanence.
Bette Howland was one of those patients. In 1968, Howland was thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons, struggling to support her family on the part-time salary of a librarian; and labouring day and night at her typewriter to be a writer. One afternoon, while staying at her friend Saul Bellow’s apartment, she swallowed a bottle of pills.
W-3 is a vivid – and often surprisingly funny – portrait of the extraordinary community of Ward 3 and a record of a defining moment in a writer’s life. The book itself would be her salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave.
Originally published in 1974 and rediscovered forty years later, this is the first edition of W-3 to be published in the UK. With an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End.
‘W-3 is one hell of a debut’ Lucy Scholes, Paris Review
‘Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves’ Sarah Hughes, iNews
Details
Reviews
“A cool, brief memoir of her stay on a psychiatric ward after a suicide attempt in the early 1970s.
”Daily Telegraph Best Biographies of the Year
“I was much moved by W-3. It is admirably straight and thoughtful, tough-minded but full of powerful feeling. The patients of W-3, black and white, men and women, dizzy, endearing, suicidal, doomed, come to us from these pages not as case studies but as our own brothers and sisters. No poses are struck and no vain gestures made in this brave and honorable book. Bette Howland is a real writer.”Saul Bellow, Nobel Prize winning author of Seize the Day
“W-3 is a portrayal of mental illness like none other. More claustrophobic than Girl, Interrupted and more frightening than The Bell Jar, Howland’s memoir maps the world of a 1970s psychiatric ward with an unflinching eye.”Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
“In W-3, Bette Howland continues to help us re-imagine the depth and breadth of humanity that a single book can contain, not only in her willingness to portray the vicissitudes of her own experience, but to observe, to empathize, to listen to and take such care with the individuals she encounters along the way.”Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want
