Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
Genre: Nonfiction/Memoir
Blurb (on back of 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.
MY OPINION: ***
Summer Reading Challenge #2: A book published in the 1990s
I don't quite know how I feel about this book. On the one hand, I enjoyed reading about this girl's life in a psychiatric ward, but on the other hand, it was such a strange and dysfunctional book.
I found this on a random list of books published in the 1990s for my 52 book reading challenge. I think there is also a film adaptation but I don't know for sure.
For those of you who didn't know, it's a memoir-non-fiction book, meaning that it's all true and real to life.
The book is told in a series of vignettes about the different girls that Susanna Kaysen meets in the psychiatric hospital. Her doctor that she's never seen before sends her to a "rich" one where you have to have a lot of money to get in.
Kaysen is told she has Borderline Personality Disorder, which, to be completely honest, I knew nothing about and still don't. I'm going to research later on but this book is not the most helpful tool if you want hard facts and information about BPD.
Basically, there's a ton of different girls at the hospital who all have their own issues and Kaysen learns to adapt to them. The whole book talks about your mind and what makes you "crazy" which I thought was a really interesting idea to explore in this book. There were a lot of interesting quotes throughout the book that thoroughly explored what the definition of crazy was and I enjoyed learning about a different side of life that I had never known about before.
My least-favorite part about this book was the fact that it was confusing and disorganized, as well as strange. Some of the sections seemed to be haphazardly thrown in that could just as easily been somewhere else. I felt as if some things weren't needed and some were so strange that they just became confusing.
Kaysen often obsesses about incredibly random things, but does that truly make her crazy? Although I do believe that she needed therapy or some form of help, I think that the four years that she spent in a psychiatric hospital were overly extreme and makes me question the medical knowledge of the time period of this book.
The entire book is a little bit creepy but keeps you intrigued through and through. I would recommend this book to readers who are interested in a nonfiction memoir about a girl who spent four years of her young life in a psychiatric ward.
Main Character: Susanna
Sidekick(s): The other girls, etc
Villain(s): Misundestandings, doctors, the hospital, etc
Nonfiction Elements: This book was based on the facts of somebody's life.
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