| Girl, Interrupted | 
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (based on 431 reviews)
Sales Rank: 3951
Category: Book
Author: Susanna Kaysen
Publisher: Vintage
Studio: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Label: Vintage
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.5
ISBN: 0679746048
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.890092
EAN: 9780679746041
ASIN: 0679746048
Publication Date: April 19, 1994
Release Date: April 19, 1994
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
In the late 1960s, the author spent nearly two years on the ward for teenage girls at McLean Hospital, a renowned psychiatric facility. Her memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perceptions, while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. "Searing . . . captures an exquisite range of self-awareness between madness and insight."--Boston Globe.
Amazon.com Review
When reality got "too dense" for 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen, she was hospitalized. It was 1967, and reality was too dense for many people. But few who are labeled mad and locked up for refusing to stick to an agreed-upon reality possess Kaysen's lucidity in sorting out a maelstrom of contrary perceptions. Her observations about hospital life are deftly rendered; often darkly funny. Her clarity about the complex province of brain and mind, of neuro-chemical activity and something more, make this book of brief essays an exquisite challenge to conventional thinking about what is normal and what is deviant.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 426 more reviews...
 Borderline Personality? I don't think so. December 19, 2008
Psychiatry has come a long way since 1967. Even according to one of the final chapters of Girl, Interupted, Susanna isn't convinced that she had Borderline Personality Disorder. I'm not either. As someone who has Borderline Personality Disorder (or at least has been diagnosed in the 2000s as having it), I don't think she fits the bill. Perhaps they diagnosed her that way because they had nothing else to diagnose her with. Perhaps that is true because she may have simply been diagnosed as a spoiled brat. I think the only reason that she "couldn't" hold a job or do anything else that sane people do is because she didn't want to. And, moreover, she didn't have to. She got to be sent away when she was 18 to a nice mental hospital while being diagnosed with a fairly mild problem and having people take care of her. She didn't HAVE to become an adult until about 2 years later. Plus, she got to do research for a book that she banked on! She's misrepresenting people that are actually insane. In my opinion, there's a difference between being crazy and being a spoiled brat.
 Anemic, totally overrated November 20, 2008
If this book was any longer, I would have had to put it down, I finished it in one day. It started out well, I was excited to hear what happens. Parts of it were really well written, then it just trailed off. You have no idea anything about her parents or her marriage which she summed up in a few sentences. It had a lot of potential, but it didn't really build up.
This book came across as a little too 'teen angst' to me, making it fashionable to be depressed. She sounds like she has a disorder, but thrives on it, almost like she's proud of it. Totally self indulgent. Don't waste your time.
Better than film October 2, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
It's actually one of the better memoirs of recent vintage (it came out in 1993 and became a bestseller in 2000, with the film's release). Not that SK is very insightful about her `borderline personality' disorder, nor capable of extended moments of insight nor poetry, but she compensates for her lack of great craftsmanship in wordplay and sentence/paragraph construction with a daring approach to the memoir.
The book, with larger than normal print, is not even 170 pages in the Vintage edition I read, and there's plenty of white space, as well as transcripts of SK's mental diagnoses within. In a sense, this sets up the piece to be quite poetic. In fact, this is where the poesy of the prose comes from, not the ability to craft gorgeous prose. Most of the few dozen `chapters' are brief- 3-4 pages is usual, and they are often dreamy or hazy recollections that sometimes briefly, violently come into focus, in describing a fellow patient's ill or death. In other chapters SK goes off rambling about mental ills, philosophy, her sexual precocity, and other things. While many of these individual reminiscences and airies fall flat, the way they are woven together and contrast with each other allow make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
This synergy got me to thinking of a poetic equivalent, and the manifest answer was the long Maximus poem series by Charles Olson- another Massachusetts resident. In that poem series, one of the few `experimental' works of poetry that actually coheres and is good, CO strings together many poems about his hometown, yet each poem/stanza is, in a sense, lacking- it fails as an individual work because it is incomplete. Yet, read one after the other the incomplete figurines each `poem' makes connect up. It's like looking at a single Matissean line on a piece of tissue paper. The individual curves and twists seem random until you lay each tissue paper over the next. Then, the full, intricate, and interesting picture emerges. Such it was in CO's poem sequence, and such it is in SK's memoir- each `chapter' a single line, sometimes non-chronological, that gives a better representation of her mindset than any straightforward prose could. Interestingly, in looking up reviews of the book, I was struck by how not a single published review (at least those online) ever mentioned this, even though the form of the book jumped out at me. This is evidence of piss poor criticism. It's akin to reviewing the first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves Of Grass, dismissing it as smutty, and not even commenting on the breakthrough structure of the free verse.
There is little bitching, and poseur pity.... In short, Girl, Interrupted is a very good work, and what any memoirist should strive to achieve. The very fact that many critics criticized it for, when boiled down, not filling their conventional needs as a reader, and chose to review it against what what they wanted (expected) it to be, argues for its specialness, and I'd bet that it will be read long after Prozac Nation or A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius have gone out of print. Smile at that, Susanna.
Just watch the movie August 20, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This was...senseless jibberjaw..Truly that is the only word that comes to mind. The movie was wonderful, but I can see now that it was very loosely based on this book.. It took a few characters and added on to their personalities.. the book was mostly just rambling and opinions. Half of the interesting things that occured in the movie were not in this book. Those that love the movie will be greatly disapointed in this. I would also like to add, you will have in completely read in one or two sittings.
 Support mental-health research August 19, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
On the first page of her novel(?), Susanna Kaysen says she had to live for two years in a "parallel universe" when she became a patient in a psychiatric hospital. In the chapter "Elementary Topography," she poses a question, how did I get to be in here?
The answer she gives, other than her being delusional, is that she was in a "state of contrariety." She goes on, "All of my integrity seemed to lie in saying No."
Two other chapters bear witness to the adversarial character of her illness, "Velocity vs. Viscosity," which deals with her obsessive thought patterns, and "Mind vs. Brain:"
"Whatever we call it--mind, character, soul--we like to think it possesses something that is greater than the sum of its neurons, and that 'animates' us."
In yet another chapter, Kaysen derides her former therapist, who was named "Melvin," and who was to become her analyst. She acts like she tolerated him as someone imposed on her, and says that she "felt sorry for him" on account of his funny name. In an internal memo, however, a nurse reported that she experienced extreme anxiety over her therapist being absent.
Part of Kaysen's "state of contrariety," then, must be seen in the light of an abject, back-against-the-wall helplessness caused by the mental illness. I pity Kaysen for her interrupted life. Her novel makes a compelling case for mental-illness research.
In the Charleston County Library, >Girl, Interrupted< is located in the "Young Adult Fiction" section, which is inappropriate for such a rough, lurid story.
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