Girl, Interrupted: A Memoir

by Susanna Kaysen

3.68 of 5 stars 19 ratings • 2 reviews • 35 shelved
Book cover for Girl, Interrupted

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30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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 a "poignant, honest ... triumphantly funny ... and heartbreaking story" (The New York Times Book Review).

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

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.
  • ISBN10 0679746048
  • ISBN13 9780679746041
  • Publish Date 19 April 1994 (first published 18 May 1993)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Out of Print 18 October 2003
  • Publish Country US
  • Publisher Random House USA Inc
  • Imprint Vintage Books