RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)... compelling and lucid ... Her memoir, clear-eyed, with an anthropological, sociological distance, is a brilliant attempt to document life on the ward with clinical detachment ... with an insightful introduction by Yiyun Li...Howland’s writing on mental distress and its consequent treatment through hospitalisation, is a wonder. Her prose is direct, unadorned, understated. Despite the horrors she endures she does not appeal for the reader’s sympathy, but rather seeks to be understood, to have her voice heard, and to have her vision of her story recounted and expressed ... Howland captures perfectly one of the existential contradictions of life on a psychiatric ward ... This account of mental distress and hospitalisation is never depressing, thanks to the compelling voice, full of wry, cool humour and clinical detachment that allows us to see not only the pain but also the absurdities of life on a psychiatric ward. This is Howland’s gift, to be able to be part of this life, and yet outside sufficiently to document it so compellingly.
