... the book feels at once crafted, its prose full of calibrated grace, and startlingly unmediated. No brush (with obscurity) is necessary to buff its surface.

This is not a story of mere neglect but of a writer’s collusion with invisibility, with a lifelong ambivalence toward selfhood and its burdens.

... a slim, witty and uncompromising memoir.

Howland’s story is not so much the description of her inner experience as it is a kind of group portrait of the ward.

... brilliantly observant.

W-3 is a debut and, as debuts go, it’s very fine, at moments dazzlingly and daringly written. In the early 70s, it was not beholden on a writer to tip-toe around the subject of mental illness, to worry about terminology or stereotyping; it is a ruthlessly straightforward, almost impudent book and all the better and wiser for it. Its author captures quite brilliantly the comical competitiveness of her fellow patients.

W-3 is not a recognizable form. What does one expect from a memoir about being institutionalized in a psychiatric ward? If there is a singular confession, it is cleverly eased over: yes, a suicide attempt, yes, a note on the method, yes, an insight into the machinery that kicks into action once you survive an attempt in 1960s urban America. But it is not a memoir that confesses to an intimate or spectacular inhabitation of neuroses.

The voice is cool and the gaze is clear: Howland doesn’t 'indulge' in reflections on her trauma or make any attempts to romanticise her illness—instead her focus is outwards, onto the ward and her fellow patients. It is a startlingly frank account of mental illness, and the contradictions and humiliations of life as a patient. In fact, the least modern thing about it might be that frankness—Howland is plainly unhampered by the need to watch her language.

... compelling and lucid.

... [Howland's] first book resurfaces with all its epigrammatic, disconcerting, and incandescent firepower intact ...[a] clinically observed yet compassionate, drolly and bravely matter-of-fact memoir.