Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
"Girl, Interrupted" is a memoir by Susanna Kaysen detailing her nearly two-year stay in a mental institution during the late 1960s. Following a brief psychiatric evaluation, Kaysen was committed to McLean Hospital after a suicide attempt, which she attributed partially to societal pressures and a disconnect between her self-image and the perceptions of those around her. The narrative intertwines her personal reflections with excerpts from her medical records, creating a stark contrast between the clinical language of her diagnosis and her expressive storytelling.
Kaysen explores themes of mental illness, societal expectations, and the artistic connections often associated with madness, drawing parallels to other literary figures and works that address women's experiences with mental health. The memoir is not just an account of her struggles but also a critique of the rigid norms of the 1960s, questioning how individuality can flourish in a culture that readily assigns labels of madness to those who deviate from expectations. Through Kaysen's mastery of irony and metaphor, "Girl, Interrupted" invites readers to reflect on the complexities of identity, creativity, and the fine line between sanity and societal normativity.
Subject Terms
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
First published: 1993
Type of work: Memoir
Time of work: 1967-1969
Locale: McLean Hospital, a psychiatric treatment center
Principal Personages:
Susanna Kaysen , the author, who was committed to a mental hospital as a teenagerGeorgina , her roommateDaisy , a teenager who commits suicideBrad Barker , a young patient who is judged “delusional” for claiming that his father is a CIA operative
Form and Content
Girl, Interrupted is Susanna Kaysen’s idiosyncratic account of the nearly two years that she spent in a mental institution, after she was “interrupted in the music of being seventeen.” In 1967, after having been interviewed briefly by a physician whom she had never seen before, Kaysen was put in a taxicab and sent to McLean Hospital, a private residential psychiatric treatment center.
Initially, Kaysen’s psychiatric treatment grew out of a failed—and fainthearted—suicide attempt involving fifty aspirin tablets, out of her failure to measure up to society’s expectations:
[M]y parents and teachers did not share my self-image. Their image of me was unstable, since it was out of kilter with reality and based on their needs and wishes. They did not put much value on my capacities, which were admittedly few, but genuine. I read everything, I wrote constantly, and I had boyfriends by the barrelful.
This same diagnosis of social maladjustment, rendered with a particularly nasty misogynistic edge, is apparently what leads the psychiatrist to recommend Kaysen’s commitment after concluding that she has been picking at a facial blemish because she has trouble with a boyfriend. Several chapters later, almost as an afterthought, Kaysen reveals that this same doctor was later accused of sexual harassment by a former patient. It is characteristic of her style that she makes little of this observation, but like her, the reader cannot help but wonder what sort of hidden agenda led to her incarceration, particularly when her release, occurring in the wake of a marriage proposal, seems equally arbitrary.
Kaysen structures her memoir by interspersing brief chapters devoted to discrete incidents with pages taken directly from her medical records from McLean Hospital, which she secured with the aid of a lawyer twenty-five years after she was discharged. The effect of this juxtaposition is jarring. The official language of craziness, the dry, matter-of-fact way in which the details of her incarceration are recorded—for example, the episode in which she bites her hand until it bleeds in order to find the bones within is labeled one of “depersonalization”—is entirely at odds with the graceful simplicity that Kaysen employs in describing her state.
Kaysen notes that madness, the madness of those incarcerated at McLean in particular, has powerful artistic connotations, McLean having housed at various times poets Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath and singers Ray Charles and James, Kate, and Livingston Taylor. She does not dwell overmuch on the nexus between her diagnosis and her own creative gifts, but she points out that in fact she did manage to make a life for herself out of boyfriends and literature. She has become a writer with published novels to her credit.
Context
Girl, Interrupted was published to nearly universal critical acclaim. Although it is a highly personal account of one person’s journey through the world of modern psychiatric medicine, Kaysen manages to make her story emblematic of the dislocation experienced by young people—young women, in particular—beset at once by societal rigidity and social chaos. How, she seems to ask, can one grow into an individual when the slightest deviation from expected norms can result in a diagnosis of mental illness that will scar one for life? How, in the culture of the 1960’s, could anyone tell what the norm was?
Kaysen’s book is a poignant addition to the literature of women and mental illness, bringing to mind such classics of the genre as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), in which the spurned first Mrs. Rochester is confined to the attic of her husband’s mansion because she is deemed mad, and Jean Rhys’s prequel, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), which explains how youth and an alien culture served to “derange” Bertha Rochester. Kaysen’s mastery of irony and understatement, and the grasp of metaphor that she demonstrates throughout her book (nowhere better than in her explanation of her distinctive title), all make a strong case for placing Girl, Interrupted in such exalted, and decidedly literary, company.
Bibliography
Bell, Deborah, ed. Lives in Stress: Women and Depression. Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1982. This series of essays by feminist therapists has special significance for Kaysen’s story, asking why so many more women than men suffer from depression.
Bernay, Toni, and Dorothy W. Cantor, eds. The Psychology of Today’s Woman: New Psychoanalytic Visions. Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1986. This series of essays by a variety of therapists offers a reassessment of feminine psychology in the light of new perceptions of femininity.
Booklist. LXXXIX, April 1, 1993, p.1396. A review of Girl, Interrupted.
Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. Rev. ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1989. First published in 1972, this was one of the first books to popularize a feminist approach to psychotherapy. The 1989 edition updates advances in the field.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. This groundbreaking work of literary criticism takes a fresh look at literary classics from a feminist point of view, pointing out how such works reflect their female authors’ attempts to circumvent social constraints.
Kirkus Reviews. LXI, March 15, 1993, p.351. A review of Girl, Interrupted.
Library Journal. CXVIII, March 15, 1993, p.95. A review of Girl, Interrupted.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. July 4, 1993, p.6. A review of Girl, Interrupted.
The New York Times Book Review. XCVIII, June 20, 1993, p.1. A review of Girl, Interrupted.
Newsweek. CXXII, July 5, 1993, p.56. A review of Girl, Interrupted.
Penfold, P. Susan, and Gillian A. Walker. Women and the Psychiatric Paradox. Montreal: Eden Press, 1983. The research of two Canadian therapists explores the differential treatment accorded male and female psychiatric patients.
Publishers Weekly. CCXL, June 14, 1993, p.51. A review of Girl, Interrupted.
Utne Reader. September, 1993, p.120. A review of Girl, Interrupted.
The Washington Post Book World. XXII, July 25, 1993, p.9. A review of Girl, Interrupted.
Women’s Review of Books. X, September, 1993, p.7. A review of Girl, Interrupted.