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Home > Book Store > Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted

Susanna Kaysen

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Available from Amazon.co.uk: Girl, Interrupted Screenplay by James Mangold, Lisa Loomer and Anna Hamilton Phelan.

Synopsis

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, 18-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital to be treated for depression. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital renowned for its famous clientele - Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor and Ray Charles. An unflinching work that asks questions about our definitions of sane and insane, Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers.

About the Author

Susanna Kaysen was born in 1948 and brought up in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she still lives. She has written two novels, ASA, AS I KNEW HIM and FAR AFIELD. While working on the latter, memories of her two year stay at McLean's psychiatric hospital began to emerge. With the help of a lawyer she obtained her 350 page file from the hospital. GIRL, INTERRUPTED followed.

Amazon.co.uk Review

Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted is the autobiographical story of the author's time in a psychiatric award in 1967. Sylvia Plath was a patient at the same hospital in the early 1950s so inevitably comparisons have been made between Plath's The Bell Jar and Kaysen's novel -- both recounting a young woman's descent into insanity. This, however, is where the similarities end -- The Bell Jar is a haunting and lyrical book; Girl, Interrupted is a more hard-edged, documentary-style narrative. It has none of the beauty and poetry of Plath's prose and is more akin to Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, an up-to-date memoir of a young girl's struggle with depression and drugs. Both these books offer a brutal and stark image of a life of mental illness.

Kaysen's account goes further and questions the standard notions of sanity and insanity. Her plausible voice allows the reader to accept a world where time is distorted, chaos reigns and questions are left unanswered, capturing perfectly the sense of helplessness and frustration felt by these women. The book's gritty realism is also heightened by copies of the author's original medical reports lodged between the chapters.

However, it is her penetrating insights into those around her, from those cared for to the caretakers, that make "Girl, Interrupted" so potent. Lacing her narrative with a hard-edged, sardonic sting, she introduces us to a cast of characters from the outrageous Lisa to the chicken-hoarding Daisy to the Martian's girlfriend:

Daisy was a seasonal event. She came before Thanksgiving and stayed through Christmas every year ... "Would anyone like to share?" the head nurse asked ... "Me! Me! Somebody who was a Martian's girlfriend and also had a little penis of her own, which she was eager to show off, raised a hand; nobody wanted to share with her.

"Girl, Interrupted" is a credible and creditable chronicle of the lives of women in the 1960s who, through the ignorance and narrow-mindedness of society, were contained and monitored for not fitting into the "norm", the mainstream.
Nicola Perry

Girl, Interrupted DVD

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Synopsis

Susanna Kaysen is depressed and unwell as a result of being out of touch with the society she grew up in. At eighteen she takes too many aspirins for her own good and is put in an asylum by the authorities. This is the story of her time in the mental hospital.

Amazon.com Review

Based on Susanna Kaysen's acclaimed journal-memoir, Girl, Interrupted bears an inevitable resemblance to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and pale comparison to that earlier classic is impossible to avoid. The mental institution settings of both films guarantee a certain degree of déjà vu and at least one Oscar winner (in this case, Angelina Jolie), since playing a loony is any actor's dream gig. Unfortunately, director James Mangold seems to have misplaced the depth and delicacy of his underrated debut, Heavy, despite a great deal of earnest effort by everyone involved. It's easy to see why Winona Ryder chose to star in (and executive-produce) this almost worthy adaptation of Kaysen's book, since it's a strong vehicle for female casting and potent drama. Mangold certainly got the former; whether he succeeded with the latter is not so clear.

To be sure, Ryder conveys the confusion and chaos that signified Kaysen's life during nearly 18 months of voluntary institutionalisation beginning in 1967. But the film seems too eager to embrace the cliché that the "crazies" of the Claymoore women's ward are saner than the war-torn world outside, and lack of narrative focus gives way to a semi-predictable character study. Susanna (Ryder) is labeled with "borderline personality disorder," a diagnosis as ambiguous as her own emotions, and while Jolie chews the scenery as the resident bad-girl sociopath, Ryder effectively conveys an odyssey from vulnerable fear to self-awareness and, finally, to healing. The ensemble cast is uniformly superb, making this drama well worthwhile, even as it treads familiar territory. If it ultimately lacks dramatic impact, Girl, Interrupted makes it painfully clear that the boundaries of dysfunction are hazy in a world where everyone's crazy once in a while.
Jeff Shannon, Amazon.com

© 2002 Ratatosk - Updated July 1., 2002

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