Girl, Interrupted
Book Description
The Boston Globe:
"Searing... Girl, Interrupted captures an exquisite range of self-awareness between madness and insight."
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 clien...
MoreThe Boston Globe:
"Searing... Girl, Interrupted captures an exquisite range of self-awareness between madness and insight."
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 document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of same and insane, mental illness and recovery.
Newsweek:
"Tough-minded... darkly comic... written with indelible clarity."
Washington Post Book World:
"Ingenious... designed to provoke unanswerable questions. Kaysen does not point morals or impose insights, but lets adroit imagery, powerful scene-writing and the silence between chapters do the work of judgment... [It is] an account of a disturbed girl's unwilling passage into womanhood... and here is the girl, looking into our faces with urgent eyes."
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