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Book Review: W-3 by Bette Howland
A memoir inspired by the University of Chicago’s psychiatric ward. BY SAGE BEHR Content Warning: Mentions of suicide and psychiatric conditions
B
ette Howland’s memoir W-3 has a unique origin story. It was originally published in 1974, launching a short literary career for Howland. After winning a MacArthur grant in 1983, the author disappeared from publishing for the rest of her life. Years after its initial publication, the editor of the Brooklyn-based magazine, A Public Space, picked up a copy of the memoir off a discount rack at a bookstore and was immediately struck by Howland’s prose as well as her unusual life. A Public Space reissued W-3— whose title refers to the University of Chicago’s psychiatric ward that inspired the memoir—in mid 2021, three and a half years after Howland’s death. The memoir begins in the days after Howland attempted suicide by swallowing a bottle of pills in her friend, lover, and lifelong correspondent Saul Bellow’s apartment. The attempt occurred while Howland, a single mother, was working as an editor and librarian and struggling to financially support her two children while continuing to write, and it led to an extended period in the University of Chicago Medicine psychiatric ward. Howland’s story, filled with inherent curiosities, is backed up by a complex and
masterful literary voice. Throughout W-3, Howland renders the intense realities of the psychiatric ward in precise and guarded prose that reveals her to be, above everything else, an observer. In the moments that she does reveal her interiority, Howland proves herself to be unafraid of the brutality of her own observations no matter where her gaze is directed. W-3 opens in the intensive care unit where Howland woke up from a coma after her suicide attempt, with no voice and “no ‘mood,’ that is to say, no surplus,” Howland writes. Howland describes her convalescence as continuing this way; cleaved from all self-governance and passive. But under the surface her sharp powers of judgment simmer, a fact that becomes extremely clear when she moves to W-3 and begins to describe the people that she meets in the ward. Howland structures the book in tight self-contained episodes that highlight various characters that live on the ward. The names of her peers are so numerous that it is easy to get confused, but the behaviors that Howland describes are hard to forget. Trudy lifts up her skirts to reveal a backside pocked with penicillin injections for gonorrhea. Basil speaks with such sincere emotion that he moves the listener—until his inability to stop talking becomes disturbing. Fran arrives
at the ward unresponsive and unwashed expresses disbelief at another patient’s and is brought back to vibrancy when outburst: “‘I’ve had intercourse with fortyshe is assigned a secretary role for three men…But I only had orgasms a patient meetings. few times…Just a few times! Almost Howland does not coddle the reader, never!’ And here the throat bulged, the nor does she spare the dignity of her big painted mouth crumpled bitterly; she fellow patients by softening her portraits. lowered her face and hung her head…I
“Howland’s writing demands the same recognition, even if, like her, it had to be lost before it could be found.” She describes meal time at the ward as “disgusting,” a battered woman’s bruises as “freakish,” and another patient on the ward as looking like “a fat baby.” In one memorable scene, Howland
was stunned. This was a textbook. Can it be that she only read it somewhere?” The behaviors of patients going through major mental health crises strike Howland as so obvious that they are
PROVIDED BY A PUBLIC PLACE PUBLISHING
APRIL 7, 2022 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13
