W-3: A Memoir by Bette Howland review – postcard from the edge
The American writer’s account of her stay on a psychiatric ward is as dazzling and daring as when it was first published, in 1974
In W-3, the psychiatric ward of a sprawling university hospital in an American city that is quite possibly Chicago, everyone looks the same, which is to say: peculiar. So many varieties of strangeness! Frankie, famed for having ripped out a lavatory bowl with her bare hands, wears a shiny black wig that sits “crooked like a roosting wing” over her eyes. Zelma, who arrived with seven pieces of matching luggage, two wigs plus stands (hair, as you will have gathered, is something of an obsession on the ward) and a collection of hardback pharmacopeias, appears at dinner in full evening dress, complete with silk opera gloves. Trudy, meanwhile, is meant to be in isolation but keeps reappearing “like a cuckoo”, perambulating the corridors “lashed to her intravenous stand – bandages, pyjama strings loosened and streaming – looking like a sort of injured parade float”.
As characters go, these three should be indelible, their sartorial and other eccentricities pinning themselves to the mind like Polaroids on a wall. Something about them, though, fails to stick. They are, in a way that’s difficult to describe precisely, interchangeable: a collection of roaming afflictions whose roots may be less particular than those charged with healing them realise. “Histories like mine, of long, debilitating illness, vague recurrent symptoms, hospitalisations, were common enough on W-3,” notes the narrator of the book in which they appear. “These things go together.”
In the early 70s, it was not beholden on a writer to tip-toe around the subject of mental illness