Title: Girl, InterruptedAuthor: Susanna Kaysen
First Published: January 1, 1993
Publisher: Vintage
Pages: 156
Genre: Memoir, Mental Health, Non-Fiction
Format: Ebook
Source: Purchased
Rating:
Synopsis:
The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties.
Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
Get the Book: AmazonReview
Susanna Kaysen was just 18 and finishing high school when she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital following a suicide attempt. There she stayed for a year and a half, her life put on pause while in ‘recovery.’ Girl, Interrupted is a memoir about her time in the hospital, following a regimented schedule of medication, therapy, interacting with other patients, and reflecting on her mental health. She’s cut off from the world, her family, current events, from the things that are frustrating and dramatic and beautiful about being a teenage girl.
Girl, Interrupted is a time capsule, taking place during a time when being a “bad girl” acting outside of your expected role would get you locked up, sequestered away from the public eye. Whether or not one was actually “crazy” was irrelevant. The field of mental health in America has gone through a period of deinstitutionalisation in the years since the events of this book, with a shift toward community based care rather than long-term psychiatric hospitals. Despite that, the book remains relevant for it’s frank exploration of mental health and how it was treated during the mid-20th century.
Quote
“Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been. What life can recover from that?”
Content Warnings
View Spoiler »About the Author
About Susanna Kaysen
Susanna Kaysen is an American author.
Kaysen was born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kaysen attended high school at the Commonwealth School in Boston and the Cambridge School before being sent to McLean Hospital in 1967 to undergo psychiatric treatment for depression. It was there she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. She was released after eighteen months. She later drew on this experience for her 1993 memoir Girl, Interrupted, which was made into a film in 1999, her role being played by Winona Ryder.
She is the daughter of the economist Carl Kaysen, a professor at MIT and former advisor to President John F. Kennedy. Her mother, deceased, was sister of architect Richard Neutra. Kaysen also has one sister and has been divorced at least once. She lived for a time in the Faroe Islands, upon which experience her novel Far Afield is based.
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