Promising Young Women

by Suzanne Scanlon

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780984469352
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/01/2012
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 6.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Suzanne Scanlon is a Chicago-based writer whose work spans fiction, creative non-fiction, performance and arts writing. She is the author of Promising Young Women (Dorothy, 2012), a novel-in-fragments about the life of a young woman in and out of institutions, and Her 37th Year, an Index (Noemi, 2015), a fictional memoir in the form of an index, following one year in a woman’s life.

Editorial Reviews

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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Promising Young Women [is] a criminally underappreciated book about being institutionalized . . . It firmly put [Scanlon] in ‘I’ll read anything she writes with great enthusiasm’ territory.” —Paper

“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

“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

“I have been moved by the book’s ability to deftly capture human existence—one that allows a strong and smart woman to simultaneously be terrified of herself and the world around her. It’s an intimate read that’s reminiscent of Sylvia Plath and Susanna Kaysen before it, but for a new age.” —The A.V. Club

“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

“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.” —PopMatters

“[Scanlon] brilliantly undermines the narrative of ‘girls with problems,’ even as she reconstructs it.” —The Rejectionist

“Promising Young Women [avoids] the rules of conventional realism, wisely opting instead for fragmentary tales to present its subject matter: a young woman in and out of psychiatric institutions.” —Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher