Book Review | Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

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Rating

5 stars -- an insightful memoir about our definitions of the sane and insane

Description

Kaysen’s tell-all memoir received an immense amount of media attention and critical praise. The book became a best seller and has recently been made into a movie. In 1967, after taking 50 aspirins to abort the parts of her that she didn’t like, the author for the first time visited a psychiatrist, who immediately called a taxi and hospitalized her. The money that her parents had intended to spend on her college education instead went into paying for a two-year stay at McClean Hospital.

Why did you choose to read this book?

I’d heard of Girl, Interrupted thanks to the movie with Winona Ryder -- we had a book sale at work recently and a copy of the book caught my eye. I picked it off the shelf last night thinking it looked like a quick read for the Book Blowout!

The Book review

The description on the back cover of the book reveals that this is Kaysen’s memoir about her stay in a psychiatric hospital so to be honest I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy reading it. From the first page I was hooked:

People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well… And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the riminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. The worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.

At aged 18, Kayson was hospitalised after a 30 minute appointment with a psychiatrist and she remained at the McLean Hospital for two years. As memories of her stay began to emerge in later life she engaged the help of a lawyer to obtain her 350 page case file. Girl, Interrupted is a series of short essays and frank memories of her time at the hospital and the events that led to her being there.

This is a vivid and insightful look at the human psyche, mental illness and our definitions of the sane and insane.

At times Kayson’s recollections of her fellow patients and their activities are funny and at times poignant and heartbreaking; this memoir has opened my eyes to mental illness and I would highly recommend that you read it.

The movie

I haven’t actually seen the movie but I just sought out the trailer on You Tube. It looks like a good film but is quite far removed from the book as far as I can tell.

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