From 1967 eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen spent two years at the famous McLean Hospital (of Sylvia Plath fame) in a psychiatric ward for teenage girls after a short session with a psychiatrist she’d never seen before. Girl, Interrupted (first published in 1993) is a memoir of her time there and told in a series of short non-chronological vignettes in which we, and Kaysen, slowly try and piece together the events that led to her spending so long at McLean and get a portrait of life in this strange and sometimes disturbing environment. ‘People ask, how did you get in there?’ writes Kaysen. ‘What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell them is it’s easy. It is easy to slip into a parallel universe. These worlds exist alongside this world.’ The book ruminates on society’s definitions of what constitutes sanity or insanity with Kaysen herself, despite her circumstances and location, sometimes feeling like a sane person in an insane world.
Girl, Interrupted is a relatively short memoir (my paperback copy runs to only 167 pages) but an interesting and very readable book that has unfortunately been a little overshadowed by the fairly average film version featuring Winona Ryder as Kaysen.
