In Girl, Interrupted Susanna Kaysen challenges the readers to question the conventional ideas of the mentally ill. In this provocative true story, Kaysen tells of her experience as an eighteen-year-old patient in a psychiatric hospital in the late 1960s. Four months after running away from her Princeton, NJ, home, Kaysen committed herself to McLean Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in an affluent suburb of Boston where many famous poets and musicians have been treated. There she was diagnosed as having a borderline personality, which is, as she describes as an adult, "a way station between neurosis and psychosis: a fractured but not disassembled psyche." The doctor who referred Kaysen to McLean described her as profoundly depressed and leading an increasingly patternless life. Recent activities in her life had included: a relationship with her high school English teacher; attempted suicide; running away from her parent's home to live in a boarding house in Cambridge, MA; and taking up with a boyfriend she describes as troublesome. The doctor, who Kaysen met only once, told her she would be at McLean for a few weeks, but she spent close to two years there. During that time she developed close friendships with several of the other teenaged patients who had a wide range of problems including drug addiction, eating disorders, and a history of sexual abuse. The friendships they formed resemble the close ties that many teenage girls have with each other. You could forget for a few minutes that they were not in the dorm room of a prep school or college as they leisurely passed the time watching television and talking about boyfriends. But these girls were in a very different place with a complete lack of privacy. They were not allowed to leave the ward, open a window, or even shave their legs without supervision. It became apparent throughout the book, though, that many patients in the ward did not want to leave the safety of the hospital. There are incidents in Girl, Interrupted that seem to leap out at the reader that are then gone without explanation. These incidences lend to the book's elusive nature and force the reader to deliberate over why some of us wind up in places like McLean. For example, James Watson, winner of 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine, visits Kaysen at McLean. It isn't clear how he knows her. He is certainly more than twenty years older than she, so perhaps he is a friend of her parents. During his visit, Watson offers to get her out of the hospital and move her over to England with him where he will help her get a job as a governess. After giving it very little thought at all, Kaysen decides to stay at McLean saying, "I'm here now Jim. I think I've got to stay here." She is more interested in him sharing the "secrets of life" for which he won a Nobel Prize than she is in leaving McLean where, despite its problems, she is safe. Although the subject of the book is intense, Kaysen's sincerity and humor soften the tragedy of the situation. At other times, however, this same sincerity and humor seem to amplify the heartbreaking situation of Kaysen's interrupted girlhood. Her deep intelligent reflections of her experiences at McLean and the way they so dramatically differ from what her records indicate make the book difficult to put down. --Deirdre Weedon |
