Girl, Interrupted

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, nonconformist teenager growing up during a tumultuous time? The book leaves the question open. Recommended.

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 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. show more 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 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 show more 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

After an initial meeting with a new psychiatrist, eighteen year old Susanna is shipped off to McClean psychiatric hospital where she is to spend the next two years. Descriptions of the ward, the other patients, and Susanna's thoughts and emotions are vivid and often troubling. The narrative is disjointed and raises many more questions than it answers, in particular, who defines insanity. I disliked the portrayal of the mental health system in this book which shows all psychiatrists, psychologists and therapists to be clueless at best, cruel at worst. Though this book takes place in another time (1967), I fear that it might influence young adult readers today to avoid seeking help for fear of being locked away or mistreated. While this show more was a fast-paced, engrossing read, I think it is best suited for older teen readers because of the fairly adult themes and language. I would likely shelve it in the adult section as I see the Ann Arbor District Library has done. I would also look to balance it in my collection with other books in which troubled characters are able to get the help they need. The Language of Goldfish by Zibby Oneal comes to mind. show less

Kaysen recounts her experience in a psychiatric facility as a teenager. It is interesting for several reasons: it describes a time and place that few of us would have access to (although I've been in enough psych wards to satisfy my own curiosity); it describes her own evolution and insights, but most important to me, it asks the important question: what is normality? Once the physiological aspects are determined, the psychological ones become particularly interesting because those are the ones that will change through time and culture. I wish she had expanded a bit more time on this, but she does open this line of questioning.
Easy to read, raw and intelligent, this book also does a lot to demystify mental illness (more so, no doubt, show more when it was first published) although I suspect many of the more traumatic experiences were not described. show less

I'm usually pretty reserved with my 5 star ratings so designating this one a 5 kind of puzzled me in a pleasant way.

Though the book is a short one (not even reaching 200 pages), I found Kaysen's prose to be smooth as butter. I wished the book was longer, actually, as I felt a weird, almost-displaced comfort in reading her depiction of a 1960's psychiatric hospital. As a nursing student, I was very drawn to the persistent familiarity of the psych ward, as Kaysen described it; even after 60 years, it seems not much has changed regarding the relationships between mental health patients and mental health nurses.

Having first seen the movie I thought the experience of reading the novel would be tainted with pre-formatted imagery and plot show more points, but it seems the producers of the movie did not reference Kaysen's eponymous autobiography when they set out to translate it to the big screen. All the better for me as I was able to meet all of the women Kaysen encountered and shared experiences with during her near two-year stay at McLean Hospital and truly appreciate the plight of questioning their own sanity.

I loved and was thankful for the pseudo-philosophical questions Kaysen poses both to her younger self and to the reader about mental health, what defines it, what constitutes it, is it a brain or mind issue, etc? Along with the seemingly-never-changing goings-on of the psych ward, the question of what constitutes a mental health abnormality and how we go about treating it has also persisted and that makes for great conversation. When the story one has to tell can successfully knock against the waves of time and push ever onward, remaining relevant and powerful in its message...that is a 5 star novel to me. show less