Praise

Bette Howland wrote a book I thought was impossible to write.

Yiyun Li

A portrayal of mental illness like none other. More claustrophobic than Girl, Interrupted and more frightening than The Bell Jar, Howland’s memoir maps the world of a 1960s psychiatric ward with an unflinching eye.

Esmé Weijun Wang

In W-3, Bette Howland continues to help us reimagine the depth and breadth of humanity that a single book can contain, not only in her willingness to portray her own experience, but to observe, to empathize, to listen to and take such care with the individuals she encounters along the way.

Lynn Steger Strong

A story about her neighbor’s heart, not her own—an anthology of the lives she encounters in the ward known as W-3. [Howland tells] the story of a collective with blunt clarity, and sidestepping the genre’s potential for sentimentality or sensationalism. She brings the particularities of the world to life.

Parul Sehgal, the New York Times

The power and poignancy of W-3 lies in its contradictions. It offers us a portal to a particular time and place, yet the compassion and truthfulness that underlies the writing renders it timeless, as urgent a read now as when it was first written nearly half a century ago.

Lucy Scholes, the Paris Review

Howland insists on telling her story — and the stories of people she met there — with blunt clarity, sidestepping sentimentality or sensationalism.

Gregory Cowles, the New York Times Editors’ Choice

A writer of terrifying power, who sees and hears everything…Not only is this a sane memoir of madness but it may well be the sanest, most mordant take on the subject.

Frances Wilson, Daily Telegraph

The resurgence of the late writer Bette Howland—thanks to A Public Space’s 2019 release of her short story collection, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage—has been one of the most exciting literary developments in recent years. This new edition of her 1974 memoir, including a poignant introduction by Yiyun Li, is a stunner.

Arianna Rebolini, BuzzFeed

Full of calibrated grace, and startlingly unmediated…[W-3] is remarkably perceptive and wise.

Katy Waldman, the New Yorker

A devastating memoir… bracingly modern. Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves.

Sarah Hughes, i news

Howland wryly punctures the myth that true salvation is within anyone’s reach, sane or not…With its incisive humor and unsparing descriptions, W-3 refuses a tidy resolution, instead showing how all the ‘clumsy, good intentions’ in the world can’t always provide a cure for the horror and tedium of losing one’s mind.

Kathleen Rooney, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Incandescent… Howland’s [memoir] is uniquely arresting in its omniscient attention, radiant artistry, zealously pursued insights, and abiding respect for those who share her struggle.

Donna Seaman, Booklist

In forms I’ve never seen before, in ways that feel revelatory and imperative to the work we might all be trying to make next, [Howland] shows how an I can also exist within a collective; how, for some communities, constantly subverting one’s own wants and needs is simply necessary in order that the group survive.

Lynn Steger Strong, Los Angeles Times

Like certain other writers on the edge of the canon—Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Smart, Tove Ditlevsen—Bette Howland wrote with an urgent dissatisfaction and narrative reluctance that make her work… unforgettable.”

Julie Phillips, 4Columns

A gallery of marvelously, devastatingly precise miniatures of Howland’s fellow inmates. Howland’s eye for detail is unfailingly sharp. She has the cartoonist’s knack of seizing and drawing out a person’s specific mannerisms and fixations, but what results is never caricature; rather, her depiction of the patients of W-3 is sensitive and sympathetic but powerfully unsentimental.

Sarah Chihaya, Bookforum

Brilliantly observant work.

Abigail Deutsch, Wall Street Journal

Whether you call it fiction or memoir, essay or reportage, Howland’s work manages to feel both rooted in its 20th-century milieu and absolutely at home among today’s genre-agnostic writing.

Laurie Muchnick, Kirkus

Howland’s sentences are precise and balanced. No pride or showing-off here; the craft lies in restraint, in what T. S. Eliot calls “a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”... Howland’s writerly carpentry—measure twice, cut once—is exquisite.

Anthony Domestico, Commonweal

With a keen and aloof eye Howland outlines the daily routines of the mental ward she’s released into… In an age of commodified self-care and quick fixes, perhaps the most radical assertion of her book is that “getting better” is not a goal to be achieved, but a life’s work.

Sara Batkie, Chicago Review of Books

Style is a great preservative in literature and the quality that Bette Howland’s… writing possess[es] in abundance, and the reason [her] work has proved worth preserving.

Joseph Epstein, Commentary

In W-3, Howland’s unforgiving descriptions disallow the reader from moving unfeelingly through the psychiatric ward where she witnessed so much. In that hardness there is recognition, and in that recognition, compassion. Howland’s writing demands the same recognition, even if, like her, it had to be lost before it could be found.

Sage Behr, South Side Weekly

Howland tracks our madnesses and oddnesses…. Her work lies in a borderland between sociology and poetry.

Abigail Deutsch, Harper’s

This book’s singularity and strength derive not only from the writing itself… but above all from Bette Howland’s unusual angle of vision: she writes as if she were a participant-observer, a novelist-anthropologist in a strange, often perplexing new place.

Johanna Kaplan, Commentary

[Her] sentences continue to beat with a stylish percussion and a glowing heart.

Donna Rifkind, Wall Street Journal

A master of silences, of the unsaid, of what cannot be addressed.

Jenessa Abrams, Guernica

Dazzlingly and daringly written.

The Guardian

Howland is rather like a chameleon, and her insights and questions are intimate but also have a universal quality…. A mysteriously talented writer, her innovative work fortunately has been revived so that Howland will have the attention she deserved, even though she did not seek it in her life.

The National Book Review

A vivid chronicle of harrowing events and how they shaped her path as a writer.

Vol. 1 Brooklyn

A compassionate, trenchant, and hilarious ethnographer of eccentricities and dysfunction.

Booklist

Howland’s powers of observation are like military-grade weapons.

University of Chicago Magazine

Looking to read a memoir? W-3 by Bette Howland is well worth the price of admission…. Not for the faint of heart, this is a beautiful book about writing your way out of real darkness. It’s brilliant. And after you read it, you won’t be able to stop yourself from devouring her strange and wonderful short story collection, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage.

192 Books