Girl, Interrupted
In the late 1960s, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen agreed, after a brief consultation with a doctor she had never met, to enter McLean Hospital, a renowned psychiatric institution outside Boston. She would remain there for nearly two years, diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
In this spare, piercing memoir, Kaysen reconstructs that time from her own memories and from her recovered hospital records: the strange, suspended life of the ward, the other young women she lived among, the rituals and cruelties of institutional care, and the ever-shifting line between sanity and madness. She probes how a life can be diverted by a single decision, and how society decides which minds to lock away — especially those of young women.
Clear-eyed and unsentimental, "Girl, Interrupted" is a landmark account of mental illness and confinement.
The title refers to a Johannes Vermeer painting titled Girl Interrupted at Her Music, which the author uses as a metaphor for how mental health struggles can disrupt the natural progression of adolescence.
The book is a memoir detailing the author's own experiences during her nearly two-year stay at McLean Hospital in the 1960s, which she reconstructed by obtaining her medical records.
While the 1999 film is based on the memoir, it incorporates significant dramatization and fictionalized elements that were not part of the author's original account.