Girl, Interrupted

Reader reviewed by K.Hager

After I saw the movie with Winona Ryder, I had to get the book. I was surprised at how well the movie had been adapted. Reading it I would have thought it would have been impossible to recreate that cocoon like world the mental hospital seemed to be for the women there.

I expected this book to be similar to the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, but while Sylvia's is a novel (dealing with her own life experiences), it reads like a novel whereas this is a definite memoir. It was strange to me that in many ways the women in this book thought of the hospital as a safe haven from the world.

If you were a fan of the movie I would definitely recommend this book. In fact, I watched it again after reading it to get more from it!

Reader reviewed by Stephanie

Susanna Kaysen was eighteen years old when a psychiatrist she had never met before diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder and sent her off to McLean, a mental hospital in Massachusetts. Within the scarily strict confines of the hospitalchecks every five minutes, maximum security, three doctors every daySusanna witnesses the comings and goings of some eclectic patients, as well as the constancy of some more of her friends. Nearly two years later, Susanna is released from McLean. But is she cured? The doctors say she is recovered, but how does one recover from something that is extremely subjective in the first place?

GIRL, INTERRUPTED is a fantastically written account of a stay in a mental hospital, in a time of American history where mental disorders were undergoing a sort of baby boom themselves, with people being diagnosed and confined to wards left and right. Kaysen artistically challenges the rampant diagnoses of mental illnesses. Readers will shudderand yet be awedat the circumstances she underwent, and wonder, perhaps a little depressingly, whether they could possibly be diagnosed for mental illness as well in such an unforgiving and untrusting world. Highly recommended!