Her 37th Year: an Index

Her 37th Year, An Index is the story of a year in one woman's life. Structured as an index, the work is a collage of excerpted conversations, letters, quotations, moments, and dreams. An exploration of longing and desire, the story follows a moment of crisis in a marriage and in the life of a woman who remains haunted by an unassimilable past. Allan Gurganus called an early version of the work a "thoroughly engrossing almanac of desire" when it was published by The Iowa Review.   Suzanne Scanlon is the author of the forthcoming Committed (Vintage / Anchor Books), a critical memoir about women, reading, and mental illness. Committed will be published in the UK by Two Roads Press, an imprint of John Murray. A Korean translation will be published by Bookhouse (Munhakdongne). Scanlon's previous books include Promising Young Women (Dorothy, 2012) and Her 37th Year, An Index (Noemi, 2015). The French translation of Promising Young Women will be published by Les Editions du Portrait in March 2024, alongside another small book, "The Moving Target of Being." Her 37th Year, An Index was a best book of the year from Electric Literature. Her 37th Year, An Index was featured in Martine Syms' short film, shown at The Museum of Modern Art, and a Swedish translation was published in 2016. A chapter of Promising Young Women was featured as part of a group exhibition titled Institutional Garbage at Sector 2337, presented by the Green Lantern Press and the Hyde Park Art Center. A fiction, "The Rape Essay," was published in Ireland, as part of A Kind of Compass, Stories on Distance (Tramp Press, 2015); "Skepticism and Affirmation" was published in Rockhaven: A History of Interiors (Which Witch) a book of photography and essays documenting the abandoned Rockhaven Sanitarium in La Crescenta, California. Scanlon's fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Granta, BOMB, Fence, The Iowa Review, Electric Literature's Recommended Reading, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, and elsewhere. She's received fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ox-Bow Artists Residency, and the Ragdale Foundation. Scanlon has an MFA+MA from Northwestern University's Litowitz Creative Writing program, and a BA from Barnard College. Currently she teaches at the School of Art Institute Chicago and is an Artist-in-Residence at Northwestern University.   "What if you compressed your life, as it existed so far, into a lexicon of impressions and moments that seem to stick, unable to shake from your self and psyche? Suzanne Scanlon's In Her Thirty-Seventh Year, An Index is such a lexicon—beautifully written, attended to tangibly and emotionally. We need more literature such as this. That is, we need literature that questions the way a body and its life unbecomes all that it seemed it was living for and towards." - Jenny Boully "The world looks different after this book. I don't know how else to say it—a simple conversation, a fleeting memory, the seemingly random are suddenly drenched with significance; one woman's life and heart layered with literature, with film, with history and philosophy and psychology. Its structure is brilliant, an archive of longing both poetic and precise; a love-letter to language. I still feel hypnotized." - Megan Stielstra "While reading Her Thirty-Seventh Year, An Index, I had to set it down many times to either think, sigh, breathe, nod, or say aloud to no one, 'I wish I wrote this.' Her new book is achingly beautiful— Scanlon writes the normally unspeakable things we think about grief, heartbreak, joy, and feminism. She figures things out for us so that we don't have to. A necessary book I will return to again and again." - Chloe Caldwell