Emily Anne Epstein

Irene Kaplan, 67, has enjoyed decorating her new apartment with statuettes, books and pictures from calendars.

The transition into supportive housing was easy for her, but she noted, “One size doesn’t fit all.”

Mentally Ill Look for Home in NYC
by Amy Zimmer / Metro

For 16 years Irene Kaplan lived in a 200-bed home for mentally ill adults in Coney Island.

“You just twiddled your thumbs and smoked yourself to death,” she said. Last year, in an experiment, the state moved her and 59 others into their own apartments where they get visits from case workers. She quit smoking during her first week in a Brownsville apartment.

A Brooklyn federal judge, who found large scale homes violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, this month ordered the state to create 4,500 units of supportive housing like Kaplan’s.

Last week the state lost its bid to stay the court order.

While Kaplan says she found a new lease in life, others are concerned at having supportive housing next door. In Far Rockaway, where over half of Queens’ adult home residents reside — and where there are many vacant apartments that could become supportive housing — residents are bracing themselves.

“A number of these poor souls, quite frankly, should not be on their own,” said Jonathan Graska, district manager of the local community board. “Nurses have called us and said they won’t take their meds.”

Coco Cox’s neighbors in Norwood don’t know she spent three years in an adult home in Riverdale, but she doesn’t hide her visits from caseworkers — the point is to integrate.

“There are millions of people with mental illness,” Cox said. “They’re on the subway with you, working with you. You just don’t know it because they take care of themselves and take medications.”

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what, has that got to do with a room of one’s own?

I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant.

They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done.

But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light.

But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback.

I should never be able to come to a conclusion.

I should never be able to fulfill what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever.

All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved.

–Virginia Woolf

Jiga left. Sad.