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Girl, Interrupted

About the Book

Girl, Interrupted

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 on 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 documnet that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

Girl, Interrupted
by Susanna Kaysen

  • Publication Date: April 19, 1994
  • Paperback: 192 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN-10: 0679746048
  • ISBN-13: 9780679746041