Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time presents a chilling view of the modern mental health system, by documenting the thoughts and experiences of a woman committed to a mental institution against her will.
Was the author basing her portrayal on real-life experience? Had she been involved with mental asylums or mental health therapy on any level in her own life - e.g. did she know someone who'd been committed?
Piercy makes no mention of such direct experience in the potted biography on her own website. She does, however, say in the FAQ:
Basically I get to exorcise my autobiographical impulses in poetry. I explore other people’s lives in my fiction. Often for me fiction embodies the choices I did not make, the paths I did not follow.
And
Fiction to me is an art of empathy and imagination. Each novel is like a small world I inhabit for a period of two or three years, and then move on to another small world. The way the I work, I learn each time about different things – areas I would never have studied for my own life.
Which suggest that she does not draw explicitly from her own biography in her novels.
