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Girl, Interrupted
"Searing...Girl, Interrupted captures an exquisite range of self-awareness
between madness and insight."--The Boston Globe
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About the Book
"Poignant, honest and triumphantly funny. . . [a] compelling and heartbreaking story." --Susan Cheever, The New York Times Book Review
"Tough-minded . . . darkly comic . . . written with indelible clarity."--Newsweek
"[A]n
account of a disturbed girl's unwilling passage into womanhood...and here is the
girl, looking into our faces with urgent eyes."--Diane Middlebrook, Washington
Post Book World
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.
About
the Author
Susanna Kaysen is also the author of the novels Asa, As I Knew Him and Far Afield. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. About
the Film Now a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. Opens December 21, 1999.