'Dazzlingly and daringly written' Rachel Cooke, Observer
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.
'W-3 is one hell of a debut' Lucy Scholes, Paris Review
'Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves' Sarah Hughes, iNews
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.
Throughout the book, we rub shoulders with the chatty and the speechless, the erratic and the withdrawn; those sedated by the system and those at the doors begging to be let out .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.
