Girl, interrupted

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Language
English

Description

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 document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

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These books have the genres "science writing -- medicine and health -- mental health" and "life stories -- facing adversity -- medical issues -- mental illness"; and the subjects "psychiatric hospital patients," "psychiatric hospitals," and "people with mental illnesses."
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How I Made It to Eighteen is a graphic novel and Girl, Interrupted is a text-only memoir, but both of these books tell brutally honest stories of battling personal demons and life in a mental institution. -- Ellen Foreman
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Though The Kiss, about Kathryn Harrison's incestuous affair with her father, is topically very different from Girl, Interrupted, about Susanna Kaysen's psychiatric institutionalization, both memoirs are brutal and candid, written with uncommonly beautiful prose. -- Jessica Zellers
These books have the appeal factors candid, and they have the genres "autobiographies and memoirs" and "science writing -- medicine and health -- mental health"; and the subjects "psychiatric hospitals," "people with mental illnesses," and "mental health."
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These books have the appeal factors candid, and they have the genres "science writing -- medicine and health -- mental health" and "life stories -- facing adversity -- medical issues -- mental illness"; and the subjects "psychiatric hospital patients," "psychiatric hospitals," and "people with mental illnesses."
Perceptive writers grapple with obsessive compulsive disorder (Because) and borderline personality disorder (Girl) in these powerful memoirs. Featuring intimate, sobering writing styles, both books transport readers into the fraught reality of living with mental illness and self-destructive behaviors. -- Kaitlin Conner
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Fans of the modern classic memoir Girl, Interrupted, about a young woman's hospitalization for borderline personality disorder, will be equally moved by the candid Everything/Nothing/Someone, recounting the author's struggle with dissociative disorder. -- Michael Shumate

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Susanna Kaysen and Norah Vincent write memoirs about their extended visits to psychiatric facilities. Both offer compelling character sketches of their fellow patients, sharp criticism for the mental health industry, and more than a little humor. -- Mike Nilsson
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More Details

Contributors
ISBN
9780613377171
9780679746041
9780786225958
9780804151115
9780786225972
9780679423669
9781439558072
Accelerated Reader
UG
Level 5.4, 5 Points
Lexile measure
760L

Published Reviews

Booklist Review

"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. ~--Stephanie Zvirin

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
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Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Library Journal Review

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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Kirkus Book Review

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.

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