In 1968 Howland was thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons, struggling to support her family on the part-time salary of a librarian; and laboring day and night at her typewriter to be a writer. One afternoon she swallowed a bottle of pills. This is her exploration of the community of Ward 3, the psychiatric wing of the Chicago hospital where she was admitted. Her memoir was the record of a defining moment in a her life. The book itself would be Howland's salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave. -- adapted from jacket