Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen, 1993
Psychology Memoir & biographyContemporary fictionLiterary fiction
Eighteen, in a Boston psychiatric ward in 1967, Kaysen reports on madness with a cool eye and a comic's timing.
Feels like wonder and unease. About madness, memory and art.
A page from the book
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. 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.
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Questions readers ask
- What is Girl, Interrupted like?
- Feels like wonder and unease. About madness, memory and art.
- What should I read after Girl, Interrupted?
- If you liked Girl, Interrupted, try My Year of Rest and Relaxation (Ottessa Moshfegh), A Daughter of the Samurai (Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto) and Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel).
A taste of the feed
What it costs to sleep through a year you don’t want to live.
I had started “hibernating” as best I could in mid-June of 2000. I was twenty-four years old. I watched summer die and autumn turn cold and gray through a broken slat in the blinds. My muscles withered. The sheets on my bed yellowed, although I usually fell asleep in front of the television on the sofa, which was from Pottery Barn and striped blue and white and sagging and covered in coffee and sweat stains.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation · Ottessa Moshfegh
A mother unpicks generations of needlework so her daughter can pass unnoticed.
All that winter the household was busy getting me ready for school. The pathos of these preparations I did not realize; nor, I think, did any of us. Mother spent evening after evening bending her stately head over wonderful embroidered garments, ripping out, stitch by stitch, the exquisite work of hands folded in rest generations ago. Then Ishi would dye the silk and make it into plain garments suitable for my school life.
A Daughter of the Samurai · Etsu Inagaki Sugimoto
A man buys supplies for a disaster and grieves the ordinary world mid-aisle.
“Laura,” he began. “Laura.” He thought it better to speak to her directly and it was already almost eleven fifty, there wasn’t time for this. Filling the cart with more food, moving quickly through this bread-and-flower-scented world, this almost-gone place, thinking of Frank in his 22nd floor apartment, high up in the snowstorm with his insomnia and his book project, his day-old New York Times and his Beethoven. Jeevan wanted desperately to reach him. He decided to call Laura later, changed his mind and called the home line while he was standing by the checkout counter, mostly because he didn’t want to make eye contact with the clerk.
Station Eleven · Emily St. John Mandel
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