Girl, Interrupted

Title: Girl, Interrupted
Author: Susanna Kaysen
Pages: 170
Summary: In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital 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.

My Thoughts: The movie adaptation of this book is one of my favorite movies of all time. It's raw, gritty, and realistic, and the book it's based on pretty much has the same tone throughout.  A memoir of Susanna Kaysen's stay at the infamous McLean Hospital, Girl, Interrupted is more like a series of essays on her point of view of what was happening in her ward at the time.  They aren't exactly in chronological order, but it isn't hard to follow along.

Kaysen's descriptions of the ward she lived in for almost two years and the people around her during that time aren't watered down or sugar coated, which I really appreciated. And when you first dive into this memoir, you start asking yourself, "Am I crazy?" Then you come to the realization that everyone has something "different" about them and how their brain works. To quote Kaysen: "Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified."
My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars