Just as Described - Bestseller Material! | Girl, Interrupted

like cuckoo's nest and Bell Jar.... | Girl, Interrupted | Susanna Kaysen

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	• Girl, Interrupted Susanna Kaysen Vintage, 1994 - 192 pages average customer review:based on 438 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Girl is Institutionalized Based on a Short Psychiatric Assessment

This is a very interesting memoir of a woman who was hospitalized in a
psychiatric institution from the age of 18 through 22 years old based on
a psychiatric interview given by a psychiatrist who had never met her be-
fore and that lasted less than an hour.

Her diagnosis was Borderline Personality Disorder. She manages to de-
scribe the symptoms of this diagnosis as parallel to adolescent angst.
Her observations and perceptions of other female patients are both mov-
ing and numerous.

I highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys memoirs with a
bent toward psychological insight.

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Just as Described - Bestseller Material!

I read this book several years ago and ordered it again because I really couldn't remember much about it. Suffice it to say I read the book in a single sitting; I fell in love with the characters all over again and the situations and stories the author tells both made me laugh, cringe and empathize at all the right times. Read it, you'll love it!

like cuckoo's nest and Bell Jar....

This is alot like One flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Bell Jar. It is not as descriptive as the other books, but does lend alot of insights in the psychiatric ward's in the 1960's..
all that Freud crap.
Really interesting and easy read.

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Amazing book

I loved the book based on the horrible movie directed by this Hollywood idiot named Jim Mangold. I love how well-written this book is. It seemed beyond me at times, but I thought it was one of the most amazing books I'd ever read. I enjoyed it. It was facasiting and interesting. I liked that it was about a real-life young woman who was taken away from her life. I can relate to that because I was too. Susanna Kaysen wasn't a bad person, just horribly misunderstood. She was a girl who lived in her own reality, she thought outside the box. They didn't understand her, so they committed her. I guess I had no idea how powerful this book really is. I hated the movie. It was a overly dramatic, Hollywoodized verison of real-life. The movie is total garbage. it's bad. The patients act like kids, they skip and dance and carry around baby dolls and act like kids and then there's weirdo Whoopi Goldberg who is strange and there's no black nurses in 1960s hospitail's. It's not even historicly accurent. It's impossible because black people didn't have the kind of freedom now that they had in the 1960s. Winona Ryder played Susanna and let's face it: she's a Hollywood actress, not Susanna Kaysen. The whole time your watching the movie, your thinking this isn't Susanna-this Winona. Angelina Jolie plays Lisa and gives a good performance but Lisa wasn't as angry or evil or cruel or bad as they made her out to be. Lisa wasn't the villian and she wasn't a sociopath. They made that up. Susanna's disease-there is no such thing. They made that up too. The patients at the place weren't her friends-so when in the movie when Susanna is leaving and says "Those girls were my friends" and there's a bunch of spastics staring out of a looming sky just laugh or ignore it. They weren't all her friends ether. People aren't like that, relationships aren't like that. That's over the top and unrelastic and exgaratted. It's not true. The only friends Susanna had was Georgia and Lisa Rowe Cody. And maybe Daisy. I guess before her demise. I feel sorry for that poor girl. there's laxative humor in the book which is gross. I hated it. I liked Susanna's writing style, funny and bold and desperctive and real and honest. I loved how she describes the famous psychiatric hospitail- it's amazing. I feel like I can see it myself. But the film is crap. The worst movie of the year. No, of the decade. A couple of decades. It's trash. The whole thing is glum and unhappy and it doesn't even end on an uplifting note. The book is better and more true to life. Lisa was never strapped to a bed ether and she didn't make Daisy kill herself. Nobody can make someone commit suicide, that's impossible. That loser took her beloved best-selling book and turned it into a crap movie. She should have never sold him the copyright. I love the end where Lisa and Susanna run into each other again. That's more positive and Lisa is a mom with a kid and goes to temple and that helps. It's more uplifing and Susanna is out of that place too and married and a writer. I don't blame people for finding this fancasting. It is. It's interesting and I guess it kind of became an obbession. I saw the movie twice and hated it. I read the book and I loved it. It's a good story and it stands on it's own ground and it is unique. Writing feels better when I am writing about something I care about. I loved this amazing book. Susanna is a cool person and it's amazing she surivced something like that and still walks around there to this day with a smile on her face. It's amazing what young women can survice and thrive and be alive after being put through pain and suffering for two years. What an amazing and interesting story. And it's real. Wow.

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Living in Two Worlds

First, be warned: this is nothing like the movie. Some of the characters are the same, but this book does not follow the same linear, safe direction as the film. Most of the events of the movie don't even take place in the book. This is a memoir of the truest sense, in that the author explores simply her own understandings of her experience, her illness, and her surroundings. Kaysen's diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder, although not discussed until the final chapters, is the overall theme of this book. Kaysen, like many of her fellow patients, is straddling the line between sanity and insanity, between the world outside the hospital and the world inside. She identifies with both the other patients and the nurses, who each represent the world they inhabit. Even though she feels a kinship with her fellow "insane" patients, she also longs for the sense of normalcy that the nurses bring in from the outside.

Although she is declared "recovered" upon her discharge in 1969, Kaysen freely admits that once you're insane, that other world never really disappears. It hovers around the edges, and even affects people who have never been inside a hospital, as if she carries a "crazy cloud" around with her. Kaysen explores the difference between insanity of the brain and insanity of the mind, arguing that each need to be treated differently. She also includes actual documents from her medical records from her time at the hospital, which provide an interesting backdrop for the narrative of the so-called "insane" person. This isn't The Bell Jar. There is no real mental breakdown, no literary examination of one's own insanity. Although Kaysen does explore her own illness to a degree, this is mostly an exploration of the dual worlds that mentally ill people must inhabit: the world of the sane, and the world of the insane.

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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 exquisite range of self-awareness between madness and insight."--Boston Globe.