Promising Young Women

August 13, 2012
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.