Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted is a slim, fragmented memoir of the nearly two years she spent on the women's ward at McLean Hospital outside Boston, beginning at age eighteen in 1967. After a brief consultation with a psychiatrist she had never met, Kaysen was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and quietly transferred from his office to an inpatient unit, where her companions included anorexics, schizophrenics, pathological liars, and other young women whose actual offense was often not fitting the era's narrow templates of female sanity. Kaysen reproduces case notes, hospital admission forms, and Vermeer paintings beside her own crystalline short chapters, building a memoir that questions both her own grip on reality and the diagnostic categories of the late 1960s. The book reads as a quiet feminist indictment of how readily a thoughtful, alienated young woman could be removed from ordinary life, and how difficult that removal made it for her to ever fully reenter it.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Girl, Interrupted
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A young woman swallows a bottle of aspirin in the late 1960s and ends up signing herself into McLean Hospital for nearly two years. Her memoir is built from her own files and the women she met there.
Yes. Girl, Interrupted is Susanna Kaysen's memoir of her time in McLean Hospital from 1967 to 1969, where she was treated for borderline personality disorder. It was published in 1993 and became a major commercial success.
Yes. James Mangold directed a 1999 film adaptation starring Winona Ryder as Susanna and Angelina Jolie, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Lisa.
Girl, Interrupted was written by Susanna Kaysen, published in 1993 by Vintage Books.
Girl, Interrupted is 180 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Girl, Interrupted takes most readers 3 to 4 hours to finish.
Girl, Interrupted is a standalone novel by Susanna Kaysen, not part of a series.
Girl, Interrupted is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.