Bette Howland's illuminating and bracing account of life in a psych ward, which marked her powerful entrance onto the literary scene, now with an introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End.
Moving and heroically funny' New York Times
'A brave and honorable book. Bette Howland is a real writer.' Saul Bellow, author of Seize the Day
'For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin--real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business; time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life could begin. At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.'
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 disheveled, 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 laboring 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 both an extraordinary portrait of the 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.
This beautiful new edition features an original introduction by Yiyun Li, Pulitzer prize-winning author of Where Reasons End.
Throughout the book, we rub shoulders with the chatty and the speechless, the erratic and the withdrawn; those sedated by the system and those at the doors begging to be let out . . . Bette Howland's work will, and should be, read and rediscovered time and time again.
