W-3
21 July 2022Synopsis
‘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
21 July 2022
9781529035957Reviews
The voice is cool and the gaze is clear . . . a startlingly frank account of mental illness, and the contradictions and humiliations of life as a patient . . . akin to a fly-on-the-wall documentary.Martha Gill, The Times
A writer of terrifying power, who sees and hears everything . . . Not only is this a sane memoir of madness but it may well be the sanest, most mordant take on the subject I have ever read.Frances Wilson, Daily Telegraph
Her memoir, clear-eyed, with an anthropological, sociological distance, is a brilliant attempt to document life on the ward with clinical detachment . . . a wonder. Her prose is direct, unadorned, under-stated.Arnold Thomas Fanning, Irish Times
At moments dazzlingly and daringly written . . . Its author captures quite brilliantly the comical competitiveness of her fellow patients – who’s the maddest here? they ask, each one hoping to claim victory . . . and she is excellent, too, at delineating what we might call the secret life of the institution. The patients exist for the hospital’s sake, rather than the other way around.Rachel Cooke, Observer
