Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen
(Author)
Description
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 AUTHORThe 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.
Product Details
Price
$17.00
$15.81
Publisher
Vintage
Publish Date
April 19, 1994
Pages
192
Dimensions
5.1 X 8.0 X 0.6 inches | 0.4 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780679746041
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About the Author
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.
Reviews
"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
