When reality got "too dense" for 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen, she was hospitalized. It was 1967, and reality was too dense for many people. But few who are labeled mad and locked up for refusing to stick to an agreed-upon reality possess Kaysen's lucidity in sorting out a maelstrom of contrary perceptions. Her observations about hospital life are deftly rendered; often darkly funny. Her clarity about the complex province of brain and mind, of neuro-chemical activity and something more, make this book of brief essays an exquisite challenge to conventional thinking about what is normal and what is deviant.


From Publishers Weekly
In these brief, direct essays, the author takes a sharp-eyed look back at her nearly two-year stay in a Boston psychiatric hospital 25 years ago. In April 1967, after a 20-minute interview with a psychiatrist she had never seen before, Kaysen, then 18 years old, was admitted to McLean Hospital, diagnosed as a borderline personality. In this series of tightly focused glimpses into this institutionalized world, she writes with a disarming and highly credible suspension of judgment about herself, other patients, the staff and the rules--overt and unspoken--that governed their interactions. Kaysen is an insightful witness, who was able even then to point out to her psychotherapist that his automobiles (a station wagon, a sedan and a sports car) were apt metaphors for his psyche: ego, superego and id. She offers a convincing and provocative taxonomy of experienced insanity--one type characterized by a sped-up, widely inclusive hyper-awareness and another by sluggish response and a sense of time drastically slowed. Supplying reproductions of documents accompanying her stay at McLean, Kaysen ( Asa, As I Knew Him ) draws few conclusions but makes an eloquent case for a broader view of "normal" behavior. Author tour. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Kaysen's tell-all memoir received an immense amount of media attention and critical praise. The book became a best seller and has recently been made into a movie. In 1967, after taking 50 aspirins to abort the parts of her that she didn't like, the author for the first time visited a psychiatrist, who immediately called a taxi and hospitalized her. The money that her parents had intended to spend on her college education instead went into paying for a two-year stay at McClean Hospital. Poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, singers James, Kate, and Livingston Taylor, as well as Ray Charles are among the hospital's renowned clientele or, as they call themselves, "graduates." Kaysen offers good insights on the connections among poetry, music, and madness as well as a vivid account of institution life. She is at her best when gossiping, describing her surroundings, and offering one-liners on her stay at McClean. Unfortunately, her reading is flat and ultimately difficult to listen to. Not a necessary purchase except where demand dictates.DPam Kingsbury, Florence, AL Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
In 1967 18-year old Susanna Kaysen voluntarily admitted herself to a two-year stay at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institute, with a diagnosis of "borderline personality." Twenty-five years later the author recalls her fellow patients, their doctors and "keepers," and her journey to recovery. Kaysen reads with a matter-of-fact style and keeps her intonation at a constant level At first, she uses little expression as she recounts her daily routine with understatement. But as she moves toward the end of her stay, her voice mirrors newfound strength. Her reading speed picks up, and she reveals a vitality not previously detected. Knowing this tape is read by the author makes the listening experience especially meaningful. A.A.B. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Kirkus Reviews
When Kaysen was 18, in 1967, she was admitted to McLean Psychiatric Hospital outside Boston, where she would spend the next 18 months. Now, 25 years and two novels (Far Afield, 1990; Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987) later, she has come to terms with the experience- -as detailed in this searing account. First there was the suicide attempt, a halfhearted one because Kaysen made a phone call before popping the 50 aspirin, leaving enough time to pump out her stomach. The next year it was McLean, which she entered after one session with a bullying doctor, a total stranger. Still, she signed herself in: ``Reality was getting too dense...all my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.'' In the series of snapshots that follows, Kaysen writes as lucidly about the dark jumble inside her head as she does about the hospital routines, the staff, the patients. Her stay didn't coincide with those of various celebrities (Ray Charles, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell), but we are not likely to forget Susan, ``thin and yellow,'' who wrapped everything in sight in toilet paper, or Daisy, whose passions were laxatives and chicken. The staff is equally memorable: ``Our keepers. As for finders--well, we had to be our own finders.'' There was no way the therapists--those dispensers of dope (Thorazine, Stelazine, Mellaril, Librium, Valium)--might improve the patients' conditions: Recovery was in the lap of the gods (``I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why''). When, all these years later, Kaysen reads her diagnosis (``Borderline Personality''), it means nothing when set alongside her descriptions of the ``parallel universe'' of the insane. It's an easy universe to enter, she assures us. We believe her. Every word counts in this brave, funny, moving reconstruction. For Kaysen, writing well has been the best revenge. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"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


From the Trade Paperback edition.

FROM OUR EDITORS

With startling clarity and honesty, Susanna Kaysen is able to recreate the terrible confusion of her institutionalized years: her feelings of depression and hopelessness; her obsession with the patterns found in things like rugs, tiled floors, and curtains; and her increasing disconnection from reality. But at the same time she examines the circumstances of her admittance to McLean. She contrasts her own account of that day with the doctor's, raising questions about each of their stories. And in the end, Kaysen can offer no definite answer as to whether or not she really did belong in that hospital. To her, it is all a matter of whose story you believe: "That doctor says he interviewed me for three hours. I say it was twenty minutes... We can't both be right. Does it matter which of us is right?" The paradox that makes GIRL, INTERRUPTED so astonishing is that Kaysen often doesn't seem sure of her own version. The girl, interrupted, has become a woman, searching -- for the true narrative of her own life.

The unsentimental depiction of the psychiatric hospital and the people in it is another strength of GIRL, INTERRUPTED. Kaysen paints searing portraits of the other young women on her ward -- Lisa, the sociopath; Polly, who set herself on fire and was left with a permanently deformed face; Daisy, who hoarded chicken carcasses under her bed. Naturally, Kaysen got to know her fellow patients and no doubt felt some kind of unspoken bond with them, but at no time does she allow herself or her audience to forget that the setting of her memoir is a mental hospital, and the patients there are very seriously ill. In contrast, at times throughout the movie adaptation, it is hard to tell if the girls are in a psychiatric hospital or a boarding school. In Kaysen's McLean Hospital, there was real sickness, and although the patients sometimes dealt with this sickness with humor and some compassion toward each other, there was no late-night bowling and girl-power bonding as seen in the recent film adaptation.

GIRL, INTERRUPTED offers few conclusions and puts forward few definitive statements. Instead, and more enticingly, it raises many questions: Was Susanna Kaysen crazy? Was she the unfortunate victim of a faulty system? If she wasn't crazy to begin with, did she go crazy while she was in the hospital? Kaysen is clearly grasping for the answers to these questions, too. The tension created by this uncertainty is part of what makes the audio so engrossing and unforgettable. Kaysen's reading gives this powerful audiobook an added dimension. Lacking the smoothness of a professional, Kaysen reads with the emotional turbulence of a person who has lived through the events but is still looking for a clear interpretation of them. At times her narration is choppy, and at other times her voice is more confident, even challenging, and I preferred this variability, which seems natural and unaffected, to the polished, distanced performance of a veteran reader.

But there is one point in which it is clear that she has come to terms with her past and, perhaps, has settled some of her own questions. It comes at the end of her narrative and is one of the lasting and haunting impressions left by the audio. Kaysen describes how, at seventeen, she came across a Vermeer painting and had an unnerving feeling that the girl in the painting "was warning me of something -- she had looked up from her work to warn me." Returning to the same painting sixteen years later, the girl only looks sad, and for the first time Kaysen notices the name of the work: "Girl Interrupted at Her Music." "Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, whatever they would be or might have been." The fact that Kaysen never illuminates whether the interruption occurred in her own mind or in the psychiatrist's office where her fate was sealed is particularly poignant and reveals the ultimate significance of GIRL, INTERRUPTED.

--Karen Burns

ANNOTATION

In the late 1960s, the author spent nearly two years on the ward for teenage girls at McLean Hospital, a renowned psychiatric facility. Her memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perceptions, while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. "Searing . . . captures an exquisite range of self-awareness between madness and insight."--Boston Globe.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Kaysen's startling account of her two-year stay at a Boston psychiatric hospital 25 years ago was an eight-week PW bestseller. (Apr.)

Library Journal

Kaysen's tell-all memoir received an immense amount of media attention and critical praise. The book became a best seller and has recently been made into a movie. In 1967, after taking 50 aspirins to abort the parts of her that she didn't like, the author for the first time visited a psychiatrist, who immediately called a taxi and hospitalized her. The money that her parents had intended to spend on her college education instead went into paying for a two-year stay at McClean Hospital. Poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, singers James, Kate, and Livingston Taylor, as well as Ray Charles are among the hospital's renowned clientele or, as they call themselves, "graduates." Kaysen offers good insights on the connections among poetry, music, and madness as well as a vivid account of institution life. She is at her best when gossiping, describing her surroundings, and offering one-liners on her stay at McClean. Unfortunately, her reading is flat and ultimately difficult to listen to. Not a necessary purchase except where demand dictates.--Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

This is a powerful and moving account of the 17 months Kaysen spent on a ward for teenage girls at McLean Psychiatric Hospital. McLean was the hospital of choice for such famous patients as Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles. Kaysen, author of the novels Asa, As I Knew Him (Vintage Contemporaries: Random, 1987) and Far Afield (Vintage Contemporaries: Random, 1990), tells her story in a series of short chapters that capture the experience of madness. Her observations about the other young women patients are sharp and touched with a feeling of surrealism that pulls the reader into her world, where the line between sanity and madness becomes murky. As in other works about psychiatric hospitals, this book has its ``good guys'' and its ``bad guys,'' but the author is fairly even-handed in her treatment of both. Included between some of the chapters are copies of documents related to Kaysen's diagnosis and treatment. This is a well-written account of one woman's journey into madness and back. Recommended for general collections.-- Lisa J. Cochenet, Rhinelander Dist. Lib., Wis.

BookList - Stephanie Zvirin

"I went out to dinner with my English teacher, and he kissed me, and I went back to Cambridge and failed biology, though I did graduate, and eventually I went crazy." Susanna Kaysen's voice isn't easy to forget; neither is the unsettling story of the "parallel universe" in which she lived for two years. Diagnosed in 1967 with a personality disorder, Kaysen, then 18 years old, admitted herself to a renowned Massachusetts psychiatric hospital, a "loony bin." Weaving in documents from her medical files, she summons up memories of those years, fusing them into a compelling pastiche, at once furious and surprisingly funny, that captures details of the time, the place, the people, and the events that were part of her disorderly, "interrupted" life. With wisdom born of hindsight, she beckons us swiftly and surely into that curious place, part safe haven, part house of horrors, and through words that inspire laughter and compassion as well as fear, she disturbs our complacency.

AudioFile - Adeane A. Bregman