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 documnet that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
When reality got "too dense" for 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen, she was hospitalized. It was 1967, and reality was too dense for many people. But few who are labeled mad and locked up for refusing to stick to an agreed-upon reality possess Kaysen's lucidity in sorting out a maelstrom of contrary perceptions. Her observations about hospital life are deftly rendered; often darkly funny. Her clarity about the complex province of brain and mind, of neuro-chemical activity and something more, make this book of brief essays an exquisite challenge to conventional thinking about what is normal and what is deviant.

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

Borderline Personality? I don't think so.:

Psychiatry has come a long way since 1967. Even according to one of the final chapters of Girl, Interupted, Susanna isn't convinced that she had Borderline Personality Disorder. I'm not either. As someone who has Borderline Personality Disorder (or at least has been diagnosed in the 2000s as having it), I don't think she fits the bill. Perhaps they diagnosed her that way because they had nothing else to diagnose her with. Perhaps that is true because she may have simply been diagnosed as a spoiled brat. I... more info

Anemic, totally overrated:

If this book was any longer, I would have had to put it down, I finished it in one day. It started out well, I was excited to hear what happens. Parts of it were really well written, then it just trailed off. You have no idea anything about her parents or her marriage which she summed up in a few sentences. It had a lot of potential, but it didn't really build up.
This book came across as a little too 'teen angst' to me, making it fashionable to be depressed. She sounds like she has a disorder, but... more info

Better than film:

It's actually one of the better memoirs of recent vintage (it came out in 1993 and became a bestseller in 2000, with the film's release). Not that SK is very insightful about her `borderline personality' disorder, nor capable of extended moments of insight nor poetry, but she compensates for her lack of great craftsmanship in wordplay and sentence/paragraph construction with a daring approach to the memoir.
The book, with larger than normal print, is not even 170 pages in the Vintage edition I read,... more info

Just watch the movie:

This was...senseless jibberjaw..Truly that is the only word that comes to mind. The movie was wonderful, but I can see now that it was very loosely based on this book.. It took a few characters and added on to their personalities.. the book was mostly just rambling and opinions. Half of the interesting things that occured in the movie were not in this book. Those that love the movie will be greatly disapointed in this. I would also like to add, you will have in completely read in one or two sittings.

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