Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

Girl, Interrupted

by Susanna Kaysen

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 in 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.

Reviewed by Joséphine on

3 of 5 stars

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Actual rating: 2.5 stars

Initial thougths: Given that the author was committed to a psychiatric hospital and Girl, Interrupted is a memoir chronicling that time, I didn't think the book did it all that much justice. Little was actually shared through the book that an observer couldn't have written. The advantage of the first-person perspective of someone who actually experienced two years at McLean Hospital didn't translate.

However, there were explorations on what it means to be mentally ill versus healthy, which against the backdrop of the 1960s did seem pertinent — such as homosexuality no longer being diagnosed as an illness. These sections somewhat made up for the lack of depth conveyed with regards to the actual experiences.

Perhaps the fact that I watched the movie adaptation for a sociology course on medicine and health a couple of year ago affected my expectations a fair bit. After dissecting and analysing the movie, I thought there'd be so much more meat to the primary text. Sadly, that wasn't the case. I didn't walk away from the book with the impression that I gained all that much beyond a collection of thoughts on whether diagnoses of the patients were justified in the first place.

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  • Started reading
  • 16 May, 2015: Finished reading
  • 16 May, 2015: Reviewed