Susanna Kaysen

Author Susanna Kaysen was having a bad day when a psychiatrist she'd never seen before referred her for hospitalization at McLean, the top-tier mental institution of the 1960s. In her memoir Girl, Interrupted, she remembers the almost two years she spent at McLean, along with the colorful characters she met there. This slight book delves into questions of sanity vs. insanity, free expression vs. control, and Thorazine vs. everything else. Was Kaysen mentally ill, or just a sensitive, show more nonconformist teenager growing up during a tumultuous time? The book leaves the question open. Recommended. show less

This was such a fast read for me. MIND YOU i’m a really slow reader and the book is quite short BUT IT WAS JUST SO CAPTIVATING. I think it was just really refreshing to read someone be so vulnerable about their feelings, about what they know and don’t know, and about their difficult past. I loved how this was structured and how she didn’t explain you the order of events or specifics on everything, she doesn’t owe it to me, but I still understood how this place worked and how her life show more worked (well the picture she painted of these things). There was a clear voice in this memoir and it wasn’t apologetic. It was brave and daring and ready and so on voice that it was moving to read. Writing something like this could not be easy. Being honest is not easy! But she did that, and i’m grateful to her for letting people read this :,). show less

Fascinating and terrifying, Girl, Interrupted was written more than two decades after the events occurred. But with about 50 years between when Susanna Kaysen's stay in mental ward took place, it's more apparent how messed up the system was (and still is to some extent). Kaysen's subject matter is riveting, but she doesn't just rely on that - her writing is top notch as well.

I wonder if I dislike “collection of vignettes” books because they are actually inferior to books with plots or because I’m just jealous that an author can be successful despite their book being a string of unconnected scenes lacking in depth and detail. Whatever the case, my main gripe with this book—that it follows that very unconnected structure and is told out of chronological order—can be justified by the simple fact that its intent is to disorient, and it achieves this end show more admirably.

I don’t think the intent was also to emotionally alienate the reader, although that’s certainly how I felt. For this being a memoir, Susanna seems incredibly distanced from—and even bored by—the events she describes. The best chapters are the philosophical ones, where she ruminates on the nature of madness and the many ways it can manifest. These, ultimately, are what redeemed the book and why it gets three stars from me. Susanna can be incredibly insightful and descriptive when she wants to be, but she mostly seems content skidding by on the surface of things without making any effort at character development, description, or tone-setting. It is told plainly and with a flat affect, as disinterested as a tranquilised psychiatric patient, content to loll in a ratty easy chair and stare mindlessly at the TV.

There is no colour to this book. If I had to assign it a colour, it would be the colour of dryer lint, or bathroom walls in that specific tone of beige that must have been manufactured in purgatory to desiccate your very soul.

Perhaps this is all meant to give the reader the most realistic possible feeling of being confined in a mental institution in the 1960s: the boredom, the listlessness, the lack of a unifying theme or plot. I can’t say whether or not it succeeds—but I certainly feel sedated after reading it. show less