'W-3 is one hell of a debut' Lucy Scholes, Paris Review
'At moments dazzlingly and daringly written' Rachel Cook, Observer
'Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves' Sarah Hughes, iNews
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.
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.
W-3 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.
Originally published in 1974 and rediscovered forty years later, this is the first edition of W-3 to be published in the UK. With an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End.
'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 . . . At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.'
'At moments dazzlingly and daringly written' Rachel Cook, Observer
'Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves' Sarah Hughes, iNews
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.
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.
W-3 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.
Originally published in 1974 and rediscovered forty years later, this is the first edition of W-3 to be published in the UK. With an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End.
'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 . . . At last it had dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.'