Imprint
- Virago
Biography: general, Prose: non-fiction
* Now a major film starring Winona Ryder, Whoopi Goldberg and Vanessa Redgrave
* A clear-sighted and unflinching memoir of an eighteen-year-old girl about her two year stay in a psychiatric hospital for depressionIn 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 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.
A clear-sighted, unflinching work that provokes questions about our definitions of sane and insane, Kaysen's extraordinary memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers.
Praise for Girl, Interrupted
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Not since Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar has a personal account of life in a mental hospital achieved as much popularity and acclaim - TIME MAGAZINE
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Intelligent and painful - GUARDIAN
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Girl, Interrupted is superb, poignant and more powerful for its lack of romantic inflation, whining, or self-congratulation - SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY
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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 - 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
Susanna Kaysen
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.
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