Description

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30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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. Her memoir of the next two years is a "poignant, honest ... triumphantly funny ... and heartbreaking story" (The New York Times Book Review).

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR

The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was 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 document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

About the Author

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SUSANNA KAYSEN has written the novels Asa, As I Knew Him and Far Afield and the memoirs Girl, Interrupted and The Camera My Mother Gave Me. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Praise For…

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"Poignant, honest and triumphantly funny ... [a] compelling and heartbreaking story." —The New York Times Book Review

"In  piercing  vignettes shadowed  with  humor [Kaysen]  brings  to life the routine of  the ward and its patients.... Kaysen's meditations on young  women  and  madness  form  a  trenchant  counterpoint  to  the copies of her medical records that are woven into the text." —The New Yorker

"An eloquent and unexpectedly funny memoir." —Vanity Fair

''Memorable and stirring ...   fascinating. A powerful examination  not only of Kaysen's own imperfections  but of  those of  the system  that diagnosed her." —Vogue

"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." —Washington Post Book World

"At  turns  wry,  sardonic,  witty  ... an  unusual  glimpse  of  a  young woman's  experience  with  insanity.  Kaysen  presents  a  meaningful analysis of  the dual and contradictory  nature of  psychiatric hospital­ization as both refuge and prison." —San Francisco Chronicle