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When it comes to writing a novel or memoir, we are often told to think about plot, but many of us are more interested in places and spaces, suggesting alternate ways to consider narrative structure. Writing her memoir, Suzanne Scanlon discovered she had to return to a building — a physical space — and this became both a recurring motif and a frame for the narrative. A narrative built by moving in and out of rooms. Rooms of memory, rooms of the past, rooms that remain and others that are no longer. The necessary writerly act of physical description — and reconstruction — is layered by a figurative consideration of the book as a room, reading as another way to enter a new space.

Suzanne Scanlon is the author of Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen (2024); Her 37th Year, An Index (2015); and Promising Young Women (2012). Scanlon’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Granta, BOMB, Fence, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ox-Bow Artists’ Residency, and the Ragdale Foundation.