Girl, Interrupted
Eighteen months on a psychiatric ward at nineteen, and a diagnosis she spends the book examining.
Susanna Kaysen writes from inside McLean Hospital, where she spends a year and a half in the late 1960s after a brief interview leads to committal on a locked ward. The account moves between short scenes of daily life among the other women on the unit and cooler passages in which Kaysen sets her own recollection against documents from her file: the admission form, the discharge summary, the record of the borderline personality diagnosis pinned to her at nineteen.
Photographic reproductions of those papers sit in the text, so a clinician reads the official version and the remembered one on the same page. Kaysen turns the diagnostic label over slowly, asking what such a category describes and what it decides. She treats her own periods of despair and bodily disturbance with a measured, examining eye rather than reenactment, keeping the reader close to how confinement and classification feel from the patient's chair.
About the author
Susanna Kaysen
Susanna Kaysen, born in 1948, is an American author. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and began writing fiction with the novels Asa, as I Knew Him and Far Afield. She is best known for Girl, Interrupted, a 1993 memoir drawn from the nearly two years she spent as a young woman in a psychiatric hospital. Her later books include the memoir The Camera My Mother Gave Me and the novel Cambridge. She lives and writes in Massachusetts.
Details
- 1993
- Vintage
- Vintage
- 192
- 9780679746041