Girl, Interrupted: A Memoir | Susanna Kaysen
192 pages | Vintage Books | 4.19.94
A thirtieth anniversary edition of the classic memoir of mental illness that was made into an award-winning film--now with a new introduction by the author about why the book has meant so much to so many.
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. Her memoir of the next two years is "poignant, honest, triumphantly funny" (The New York Times Book Review), and has become a classic in the tradition of The Bell Jar and An Unquiet Mind.
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. 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" from the perspective of a young woman trapped within it, while raising thought-provoking questions about our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
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. 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" from the perspective of a young woman trapped within it, while raising thought-provoking questions about our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
