A young woman wakes in an unfamiliar white room. There is a name on the hospital bracelet – Anna – but “nothing attaches itself to the letters”. She has lost her self; “something has happened to her memory”. The reader recognises the cues more quickly than Anna does: this is a psychiatric institution, where Anna is told that she is recuperating after a round of electroconvulsive treatment – not her first. She has been a patient for six weeks: “Perhaps she has had this awakening many times before, her self split over and over again.”
The project of Anna Jacobson’s remarkable debut memoir, How to Knit a Human, is to record the splintering of her self and memory after a severe psychotic episode. Jacobson was the subject of an involuntary treatment order and several rounds of ECT, in the aftermath of which she experienced serious memory loss. She lost her autonomy too, for a time, and How to Knit a Human is less a memoir of recovery than of reintegration, and a powerful reclamation of that lost autonomy through art. As the book progresses, Jacobson shifts the narrative mode from an unknown and unknowable third person to a steady assertion of the first person.
