A review by eleanorfranzen
W-3: A Memoir by Bette Howland

Kindly sent in a parcel of proof copies by Rebecca! A short memoir of a few months Howland spent in a psychiatric ward after attempting suicide at the age of thirty-one, this is much less a personal excavation—as the introduction by Yiyun Li notes, Howland is barely present in her own retelling—and much more a kind of encyclopaedic guide or handbook to the denizens of the ward. Both men and women live there, which surprised me slightly, and the treatment strategy of heavily medicating the inmates while also failing to even mildly chastise them for doing things like standing on the dinner table and revealing their bare buttocks to other patients feels extremely of its time. In fact, most of W-3 feels like this, a portrait of a world that was at least as terrifying outside the ward as inside: rape is a fact of life for most of the women, children and vulnerable young adults are given no special consideration, let alone a call to social services, and physically disabled patients are trapped in wheelchairs with all the manoeuvrability of a small moon, in environments that no one even contemplates attempting to make “accessible”. Howland was very observant, and she survived, but I didn’t really enjoy reading this, not so much because her descriptions of mad people are disturbing (though they are) but because of the sense that the real madhouse was Chicago in the ’70s, and there was no getting out of that.