Susanna Kaysen started going to therapy at age fifteen, and throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, she saw dozens of psychiatrists. But it wasn’t until she was eighteen that her parents placed her in a psychiatric hospital. There she discovered a new girlhood, one that is both painful and liberating.In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she’d never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele–Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles–as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.
Susanna Kaysen was eighteen when she was sent to McLean Hospital. For two years she was a young girl surrounded by other young women and their struggles with the mental health system. With insight and grace, Girl, Interrupted is an often harrowing account of those two years that goes beyond other institutional accounts with its mesmerizing voice, humor and unforgettable characters. In the words of Plath, “this book is not a novel but rather a case history.”
The widely read novel Girl, Interrupted: A Memoir of a Life, Not to be Forgotten chronicles Susanna Kaysen’s 18 months in a mental hospital in 1967 before she was released back into her normal life. She went to the hospital after being raped by a friend and was found to have intermittent depression and anxiety. Her doctor recommended she go to a hospital for treatment, but she ended up staying much longer than she expected (and her parents wanted). Many patients on the hospital’s female ward were there because they wanted freedom from their parents or society.
About Girl, Interrupted Book
In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she’d never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele–Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles–as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.
Kaysen’s memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a “parallel universe” set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching documnet that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
