RavePorter House ReviewThe book’s impulse to orbit its prose around quantitative data might feel distancing if Wang didn’t find inventive ways to write into an emotive, personal kind of calculus ... Wang doesn’t go into exhaustive detail about her experiences in involuntary psychiatric commitment—which she refers to as some of her strongest sources of trauma—and by refusing to do so, she doesn’t allow others to render her pain into something performative. Instead, she moderates the perspectives of others who share the genus of her diagnosis, an impulse that animates the collectivity of the book’s title, denies the connotative isolation, and speaks of her own manifestation of the schizophrenias in terms of her most individualized filters ... a collection that demands, and excavates space, for Wang to be heard on her own terms. She speaks not to people who want to witness her but rather to people who are like her, people have been forced to look at their illnesses from the outside in for as long as mental illness has texturized fictional landscapes with fear and spectacle. By making public what is deeply personal, by lacquering the personal with numbers and facts in an appeal to be seen as human rather than mythic, Wang has created essential reading in The Collected Schizophrenias—but, most importantly, she has done so for those who are afflicted rather than those who would spectate the affliction.
