Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen, 1993
Eighteen, in a Boston psychiatric ward in 1967, Kaysen reports on madness with a cool eye and a comic's timing.
Susanna Kaysen
Kaysen was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at eighteen and spent about two years in and out of McLean Hospital; the memoir appeared twenty-five years later.
Feels like madness, wonder and unease.
Somewhere along the way, the ordinary laws stopped applying.
But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening? In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down1 a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest1 and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers. Books by Susanna Kaysen
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