Girl, Interrupted, By Susanna Kaysen

6 Pages 1433 Words

Girl, Interrupted, By Susanna Kaysen
The book Girl, Interrupted, is more of a collection of brief essays on Susanna Kaysen’s experiences rather than a story, contains more of Susanna’s personal insight on her disorder and allows the reader to be come more intimate with Susanna. The novel is the autobiographical account of Susanna Kaysen’s life just after her graduation from high school in the late 1960s. At this point in her life, Susanna has no direction decides to attempt suicide, taking a bottle of aspirin followed by a fifth of vodka. Susanna survived her suicide attempt and was then sent by her parents to see a psychiatrist. At their first meeting, of which Susanna still cannot recall the length, the psychiatrist immediately decided that Susanna would require hospitalization in a psychiatric ward. Directly following that meeting, Susanna is put into a cab and sent to the McLean Hospital. Upon her arrival at the hospital, Susanna is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and spends over a year in the ward. Throughout the course of the book, Susanna describes her year at the hospital, including the people she met and events that took place. She describes the other girls in her ward: a sociopath, a pathological liar, a girl that is sexually abused, a girl that lit herself on fire, etc. She also tells of events: the visit of her boyfriend, a trip to the ice cream parlor, and of the times when her friend, Lisa, ran away. There is no plot, the book is simply a gathering of her observations from her inner self, other patients and their lives, and the world in that year in which Susanna’s life was interrupted, retold in a “darkly comedic” fashion. The language used is alternately funny, quirky, and sometimes brutally strong. Susanna describes her world at this time as a “parallel universe” often questioning if she is crazy and what it is that determines a person to be crazy. The book does not concentr...