Bette Howland's W-3 , reviewed by Lydia Fultz

A Review of “W-3” by Bette Howland

Reviewed by Lydia Fultz Originally published in 1974, Bette Howland’s memoir, W-3, had long been out of print when it was rediscovered on the dollar rack at a secondhand book store by Brigid Hughes, founding editor of A Public Space. APS Books has since reprinted two of Howland’s works: W-3 (2021), as well as a collection of Howland’s shorter pieces titled Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (2019).

If Howland’s resurgence is remarkable, it is almost even more surprising that she faded from public consciousness in the first place. W-3, the author’s account of her suicide attempt and subsequent stay on a Chicago psychiatric ward, is evidence of an extraordinary talent—a gift for relentless detail and brutal yet elegant prose. The memoir opens with Howland regaining consciousness in the intensive care unit, and the sense of immersion is immediate. Howland conjures the limited world of her hospital bed with an unlikely combination of vulnerability and detachment: There were other things. The coughing machine for instance, a rackety apparatus; violent activity, the equivalent of swimming a choppy channel. It had been with me twenty minutes out of every hour of the day and night, the first thing I had become aware of, and now one of the strange but primary facts of my life. I had vomited, as people who take a massive overdose of sleeping pills are apt to do, and the matter had been sucked and swallowed into my lungs; I was being dredged out. These were the—unanticipated—physiological facts.

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B O OK R E V I E W

Later, Howland’s circumscribed environment expands to include the physical and psychic terrain of W-3, the hospital’s psychiatric ward. The reader is continually invited to observe through Howland’s unflinching eye; as a result, there is a sense of familiarity, even intimacy, with the rooms and hallways and people who populate them. Much of the memoir focuses on W-3’s “inmates” (a term frequently used by Howland to describe herself and fellow patients), a rotating cast of the injured, lost, and frequently defiant. These depictions do not come across as sensational or derogatory, and often suggest kinship, even when the author maintains ostensible distance.

And yet, the sharpest, most memorable parts of the book lie in the author’s moments of self-reflection: on her mental breakdown, or the difficulties in being a single parent in the late 1960s. In one passage, Howland describes watching her sons out the hospital window as they leave with her mother, bound for Florida, where they will stay for an unspecified length of time: My mother stooped down, prompting them: wave at your mother. Two sleeves came up, hands paddling up and down.

They got back into the car, looking around over their shoulders all the while and waving. As the car drove off, I could see the two heads together still looking out, two pairs of dark frightened eyes still searching all the windows. The hands still mechanically waving. I knew they’d never seen me. They must be wondering now if they ever would. It was a terrible thing I had done to them. And I felt like a ghost.

W-3 comes across as tedious at times, a result of Howland’s meticulous approach. However, the inclusion of seemingly irrelevant details and mundane dialogue reflects the boredom and uniformity of W-3, and consequently, all psychiatric facilities. Regardless of apparent faults, this is a work of authenticity that provides a point of identification for those who

LY DI A F U LT Z

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have been in similar situations—a crucial function of the mental health memoir, and one that W-3 performs well.

Eventually, Howland leaves the hospital, rents an apartment, and reunites with her children. To her credit, she avoids assigning an overarching meaning to her experience, ending the book on an almost mundane note: One day some months after I had left W-3 for good it all of a sudden occurred to me—I had had what is called a breakdown.

That was what had happened, but I didn’t know it. That is, I believe, one of the characteristics of the condition. By then I had moved on into other regions, and the world had no special terrors for me. In other words, it might also be described as a place.

Far from being glib, this conclusion creates a space for mental illness as a legitimate malady. Howland implies that our bodies— and our minds—are subject to sickness; but we are not defined by our health, past or present.

Little is known about Howland’s life after W-3 ends. After a brief period of literary success in the late 70s and early 80s that included both a Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowship, she stopped publishing books and was largely forgotten until Hughes’ fortuitous discovery in 2015. Bette Howland passed away in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2017, just missing her work’s resurgence. Now we can only imagine what she would have made of it, but at least we can once again hear a voice that was silent for so long.