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Girl, Interrupted
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Girl, Interrupted (1994) (edit title/settings)

by Susanna Kaysen (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

In the late 1960s, the author spent nearly two years on the ward for teenage girls at McLean Hospital, a renowned psychiatric facility. Her memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perceptions, while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. "Searing ... captures an... read more

Summary edit see section history

Susanna Kaysen, an eighteen-year-old in April of 1967, agrees to enter McLean Hospital, a residential psychiatric facility in Massachusetts. Although she plans to stay only a few weeks, Kaysen remains at McLean for nearly two years. The doctor who forcefully advocates her committal to a mental... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

Susanna Kaysen, an eighteen-year-old in April of 1967, agrees to enter McLean Hospital, a residential psychiatric facility in Massachusetts. Although she plans to stay only a few weeks, Kaysen remains at McLean for nearly two years. The doctor who forcefully advocates her committal to a mental hospital interviewed Kaysen for only twenty minutes.


Kaysen tells the story of the people and experiences she encounters at McLean in a series of nonchronological vignettes. Among the patients admitted to her ward, Kaysen describes Polly, a kind patient with disfiguring, self-inflicted burns to her face and body. Lisa, another patient, entertains Kaysen with her escape attempts and exaggerated contempt for hospital authorities. Kaysen’s roommate, Georgina, struggles to maintain a relationship with Wade, a violent and unstable boyfriend from another ward, who tells the girls seemingly outlandish stories about his father’s exploits with the CIA. The twin obsessions of roasted chicken and laxatives make a newly arrived patient named Daisy the object of much speculation. Daisy ultimately leaves the hospital, only to commit suicide on her birthday.

One day, James Watson, a Nobel laureate and friend of the Kaysen family, visits Kaysen. He offers to take her away from the cold, prisonlike facility, but she rejects the offer, convinced that she should stay the course of her treatment. Kaysen discloses an unsuccessful suicide attempt involving an aspirin overdose in high school. She considers the nature of her illness, which includes difficulty making visual sense of patterns, and wonders whether sanity is merely an illusion that people construct to feel “normal.” Because many famous people have been residents of McLean Hospital, Kaysen speculates that creative minds, especially poets’, may be prone to mental illness.

The hospital’s strict rules dictate patients’ daily routines. Nurses perform “checks,” periodic visual appraisals of a patient’s activities and whereabouts, according to a schedule that corresponds to the severity of the patient’s illness. The staff confiscates any possessions that might inflict injury, even earrings and belts. Field trips outside the hospital walls are rare and require a complex system of patient-to-nurse accompaniment.

Lisa Cody, a new patient, arrives and threatens the social position of a current resident, also named Lisa, who torments the new girl until she leaves McLean and falls into more desperate circumstances. At this point, Kaysen considers the twenty-minute consultation that resulted in her hospitalization. Analysis of hospital records is inconclusive, and Kaysen’s doubts about the accuracy of her memory leads her into a discussion of the nature of mental illness, which Kaysen believes falls into two categories: slow or “viscous” and fast or having “velocity.” Kaysen believes that both kinds of illness result in the same type of mental paralysis.

Kaysen introduces us to Valerie, the young head nurse, who wins the girls’ respect with her no-nonsense approach to the job and a willingness to stand up to the doctors. Dr. Wick, an older psychiatrist, has trouble relating to the youth culture of her patients and becomes uncomfortable during any discussion of sex. The girls uniformly detest Mrs. McWeeney, the evening nurse, who is decidedly old-fashioned in her dress, speech, and insistence on strict authority.


The year 1968 is an exciting and frightening year, and Kaysen and the other girls watch its tumultuous events unfold on television. Simply viewing the world’s turbulence temporarily calms them. The girls come to realize that they are sitting on the sidelines of the era’s events and their own lives.

Torrey, a methamphetamine addict from Mexico, arrives on the ward. Torrey’s parents are embarrassed by their daughter’s problems. When Torrey’s parents come to retrieve her, Lisa attempts to help her escape her parents, but Valerie doses Torrey with Thorazine to foil the plan. The other girls fall into a depression. Kaysen suffers an episode of depersonalization that leads her to attempt to tear open her hand to confirm that she has bones beneath the skin.

Kaysen’s wisdom tooth becomes infected, and Valerie takes her from McLean to a dentist in Boston. Kaysen becomes frantic when, upon waking from the general anesthesia, no one will tell her how long she was unconscious. She worries that she has “lost” time.

A new patient named Alice Calais enters the ward, but a mental breakdown leads to her transfer to maximum security. The girls visit Alice, whose condition and living arrangements sicken them. They vow never to let the same thing happen to them. Kaysen starts sessions with Melvin, a therapist with whom she begins an advanced form of analysis. Enthralled with the tunnels below the hospital, Kaysen struggles to convey their meaning to Melvin. She discovers she is Melvin’s first patient, and then she gladly leaves analysis behind.

As Kaysen heals, she searches for a job outside the hospital, quickly becoming acquainted with the widespread prejudice that haunts former mental patients. Even applying for telephone service or a driver’s license requires a doctor’s note. Kaysen resumes a relationship she began with a man she knew before entering the hospital and impulsively accepts his marriage proposal. Reflecting on the difference between the mind and the brain, Kaysen wonders whether doctors treat one at the expense of the other. She reveals her diagnosis: borderline personality disorder. Dissecting the medical definition of the disorder, Kaysen notes that it is much more commonly diagnosed in women than in men. She wonders to what degree sexism and psychiatric fads influence the diagnoses.

Some years after leaving McLean, Kaysen visits Georgina, now married and as eccentric as ever. Kaysen also runs into Lisa, who has a young child and lives in a respectable suburb. Kaysen detects traces of Lisa’s old personality beneath the persona of a suburban mother. In the final chapter, Kaysen reveals the origin of the title of the book, Girl, Interrupted. Separated by some twenty years, Kaysen stands in front of the painting at New York’s Frick Museum. The painting holds very different meanings on each occasion; the changing interpretation reflects Kaysen’s life experience.

Characters/People edit see section history

  • Susanna Kaysen: The autobiographical main character, Susanna Kaysen is admitted to a psychiatric ward to be treated for borderline personality disorder following a suicide attempt. She voluntarily admits herself after a short consultation with a psychiatrist who is also an acquaintance of the family. She is told that she will only be staying there for a few weeks, but it turns out to be close to two years instead. Throughout the book, she frequently contrasts the time of the consultation, 20 minutes, to the time she ended up spending there.
  • Lisa Rowe: Diagnosed as a sociopath, she apparently takes some pride in her diagnosis. Whether she is actually a sociopath is left open to interpretation. She periodically escapes from the hospital, only to be found a day or two later and re-admitted. She is usually happy enough to be back though she does put up a fight when restrained. She is an ex-junkie who never sleeps and barely eats, and enjoys making trouble for the staff. She apparently takes some pride in her diagnosis. Her behavior is wildly unpredictable, and while she can be kind, she is also capable of cruelty towards the other patients.
  • Lisa Cody: Also diagnosed as a sociopath, a former drug addict. She is admitted while Kaysen is there and from the beginning looks up to Lisa Rowe.
  • Polly: A disfigured patient hospitalized for schizophrenia and depression.
  • Georgina: Hospitalized because of schizophrenia; it is not clear what the immediate reason for her diagnosis is.
  • Daisy: Addicted to laxatives, possibly has obsessive compulsive disorder.
  • Torrey: An ex-drug addict. She was put into the ward after her parents discovered her promiscuity. She is the best friend of all the fellow patients.
  • Alice Calais: At first she seems quiet and, in Kaysen's words, "not too crazy" but she eventually breaks down and is taken to maximum security after about a month.
  • Wade: Georgina's boyfriend, also a patient.
  • Cynthia: A severely depressive patient, who undergoes weekly electro-convulsive therapy.
  • Melvin: Kaysen's therapist and analyst.
  • Dr. Wick: The consultant psychiatrist.
  • Mrs. McWeeney: The evening nurse on the ward. T
  • Valerie: The head nurse on the ward. Well respected by the patients.
Show all 14 characters
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Quotes edit see section history

  • “Scar tissue has no character. It's not like skin. It doesn't show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It's like a slipcover. It shields and disguises what's beneath. That's why we grow it; we have something to hide.”
  • “Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified.”
  • “I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't”
  • “It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.”
  • “I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that it was my task to swallow fifty asprin.It was my task:my job for the day”
  • “Suicide is a form of murder— premeditated murder. It isn’t something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes some getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive. A successful suicide demands good organization and a cool head, both of which are usually incompatible with the suicidal state of mind. It’s important to cultivate detachment. One way to do this is to practice imagining yourself dead, or in the process of dying. If there’s a window, you must imagine your body falling out the window. If there’s a knife, you must imagine the knife piercing your skin. If there’s a train coming, you must imagine your torso flattened under its wheels. These exercises are necessary to achieving the proper distance. The debate was wearing me out. Once you've posed that question, it won't go away. I think many people kill themselves simply to stop the debate about whether they will or they won't. Anything I thought or did was immediately drawn into the debate. Made a stupid remark—why not kill myself? Missed the bus—better put an end to it all. Even the good got in there. I liked that movie—maybe I shouldn’t kill myself. In reality, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy."”
  • “It’s a mean world. There’s nobody to take care of you out there.”
    Lisa
  • “When you’re sad, you need to hear your sorrow structured into sound.”
  • “If I who was previously revolting am now this far from my crazy self, how much further are you who were never revolting, and how much deeper your revulsion?”
    Susanna Kaysen
  • “I wanted to be going on alone to my future.”
    Susanna Kaysen
  • “There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don’t feel the same.”
    Susanna Kaysen
  • “You can spend another half a minute suspended between two realms of consciousness: the one that knows that you aren’t moving and the one that feels you are. You can flit back and forth between these perceptions and experience a sort of mental vertigo. And if you do this, you are treading on the ground of craziness—a place where false impressions have all the hallmarks of reality.”
    Susanna Kaysen
  • “I saw myself, quiet correctly, as unfit for the educational and social systems.”
    Susanna Kaysen
  • “As far as I could see, life demanded skills that I didn’t have.”
    Susanna Kaysen
  • “What would have been an appropriate level of intensity for my anger at being shut out of life? My classmates were spinning their fantasies for the future: lawyer, ethnobotanist, Buddhist monk (it was a very progressive high school). Even the dumb uninteresting ones who were there to provide “balance” looked forward to their marriages and their children. I knew I wasn’t going to have any of this because I knew I didn’t want it. But did that mean I would have nothing?”
    Susanna Kaysen
  • “Emptiness and boredom: what an understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair, depression.”
    Susanna Kaysen
  • “I didn’t say anything—I’d learned not to discuss my doubts.”
    Susanna
  • “One moment made to stand still and to stand for all the other moments, what ever they might be or might have been. What life can recover from that?”
    Susanna
Show all 18 quotes from this book

First Sentence edit see section history

People ask, How did you get in there?

Series & Lists edit see section history

This book is in The Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge. (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Susanna Kaysen (Author)

Other Contributors:

  1. Anna Hamilton Phelan
  2. James Mangold
  3. Lisa Loomer

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Country: United States of America
Publication Date: April 19, 1994
ISBN: 0679746048
Page Count: 192

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: RC464.K36
  • Dewey: 616.890092

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Reading Level: Young Adults

This book deals with some tough themes of mental health. Some violence, language and sexual content. Suicide is also discussed and may be a difficult subject for some.

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
  • Prozac Nation
  • The Bell Jar

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