Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted

1993 • 169 pages

Ratings150

Average rating3.7

15

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 in 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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Reviews

Popular Reviews

Reviews with the most likes.

I couldn't put it down, read it straight through in one night. Absolutely fantastic.

November 8, 2020

Maybe uncomfortable at times but a good story none the less

May 25, 2021

the movie sold this book so short, if you enjoyed the film the book is better.

February 17, 2024

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