Description
| Product ID: | 9781529035957 |
| Product Form: | Paperback / softback |
| Country of Manufacture: | GB |
| Title: | W-3 |
| Subtitle: | A Memoir |
| Authors: | Author: Bette Howland |
| Page Count: | 224 |
| Subjects: | Autobiography: writers, Autobiography: literary, Memoirs, Care of people with mental health issues, Memoirs, Care of the mentally ill, Illinois, c 1970 to c 1980 |
| Description: | Select Guide Rating 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. <p><b>‘</b><b>Dazzlingly and daringly written</b><b>’</b><b> Rachel Cooke, <i>Observer</i></b><br><br>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.<br><br>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.<br><br><i>W-3</i> 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.<br><br>Originally published in 1974 and rediscovered forty years later, this is the first edition of <i>W-3</i> to be published in the UK. With an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of <i>Where Reasons End</i>.<br><br><b>‘</b><b><i>W-3</i> is one hell of a debut</b><b>’ Lucy Scholes, <i>Paris Review</i><br><br>‘</b><b>Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves</b><b>’</b><b> Sarah Hughes, <i>iNews</i></b></p> |
| Imprint Name: | Picador |
| Publisher Name: | Pan Macmillan |
| Country of Publication: | GB |
| Publishing Date: | 2022-07-21 |