Girl, Interrupted
Authors: Susanna Kaysen
Acclaim for Susanna Kaysen’s
Girl, Interrupted
“A bitter, funny, insightful memoir … A minimalist relative of
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, Kaysen’s spare, elegant book raises angry questions about just who’s crazy, and who’s in charge of figuring it out.”
—
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Written [in] bare-bones prose, funny, readable and true. The great success of
Girl, Interrupted
is that it avoids the romantic inflation that most other sufferers of psychosis fall into when they describe their experience. Kaysen simply lets us know, with spare poetry, what it is like to have a life interrupted by madness.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“In piercing vignettes shadowed with humor [Kaysen] brings to life the routine of the ward and its patients.… Kaysen’s meditations on young women and madness form a trenchant counterpoint to the copies of her medical records that are woven into the text.”
—The New Yorker
“An eloquent and unexpectedly funny memoir.”
—
Vanity Fair
“At turns wry, sardonic, witty … an unusual glimpse of a young woman’s experience with insanity. Kaysen presents a meaningful analysis of the dual and contradictory nature of psychiatric hospitalization as both refuge and prison.”
—
San Francisco Chronicle
“Nothing short of astonishing … unusually frank and thoughtful …
Girl, Interrupted
[gives] a piercing sense of how very short is the journey from humor to outright horror … remarkable.”
—
Mirabella
“Memorable and stirring … fascinating. A powerful examination not only of Kaysen’s own imperfections but of those of the system that diagnosed her.”
—
Vogue
“
Girl, Interrupted
is a writer’s book, crafted by an author of extraordinary acuteness and skill. Kaysen takes us across the boundaries of ‘normalcy.’
Girl, Interrupted
is about the borders between the world inside the hospital and the world outside, between sanity and insanity, between freedom and captivity, between self and other, between dignity and shame, between power and powerlessness.”
—Boston Phoenix Literary Section
“Remarkable … In prose lean and mean, Kaysen’s memoir brings us inside [McLean] and paints a picture of madness that is both disturbing and compelling.”
—Detroit News
“Using herself as a troubled—and troubling—example, Kaysen demonstrates with excoriating humor the severe problems with diagnosis, the phenomenon of psychiatric hospitalization and the callousness of even the most sophisticated of families and hospitals.
Girl, Interrupted
is more than a ’60s period piece. It is a cautionary tale for our time, for any era struggling to balance on the razor’s edge between sanity and insanity.”
—
St. Louis Post Dispatch
“Susanna Kaysen’s candid memoir of her stay in a psychiatric hospital breaks the mold. It is both funny and frightening. Kaysen’s account is provocative, concise writing with an occasional edge of black humor. It makes us examine our own minds and wonder just who has the right to decide if someone has gone mad.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“
Girl, Interrupted
is Ms. Kaysen’s sly, witty memoir [in] which she writes vividly pf the McLean community in the late ’60s: beleaguered nurses, ineffective doctors, obsessed patients. Kaysen finds her reality in writing, inside.”
—
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Susanna Kaysen
Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen is also the author of the novels
Asa, As I Knew Him
and
Far Afield
. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Books by Susanna Kaysen
Asa, As I Knew Him
Far Afield
Girl, Interrupted
First Vintage Books Edition, June 1994
Copyright © 1993 by Susanna Kaysen
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Turtle Bay Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1993.
Portions of this book, in slightly different form, appeared in
Agni
,
The Boston Review
, and
Ploughshares
.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to American Psychiatric Press for permission to reprint the entry for Borderline Personality Disorder from the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, Revised
, Washington, D.C., American Psychiatric Association, 1987. Reprinted by permission.
The author is grateful to the Artists Foundation of Massachusetts and the Corporation of Yaddo for their generosity.
Though this book is nonfiction, some of the names and distinguishing traits of patients, doctors, and staff have been changed.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kaysen, Susanna, 1948–
Girl, interrupted / Susanna Kaysen.—1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York: Turtle Bay Books, 1993.
eISBN: 978-0-8041-5111-5
1. Kaysen, Susanna, 1948—Mental health. 2. Psychiatric hospital patients—Massachusetts—Biography. I. Title
RC464.K36A3 1994
616.89′ 0092—dc20
[B] 93-43339
Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger
v3.1_r2
For Ingrid and Sanford
Contents
Toward a Topography of the Parallel Universe
If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now
Calais Is Engraved on My Heart
New Frontiers in Dental Health
Borderline Personality Disorder
Farther on, Down the Road, You Will Accompany Me
Toward a Topography of the Parallel Universe
People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It’s easy.
And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.
My roommate Georgina came in swiftly and totally, during her junior year at Vassar. She was in a theater watching a movie when a tidal wave of blackness broke over her head. The entire world was obliterated—for a few minutes. She knew she had gone crazy. She looked around the theater to see if it had happened to everyone, but all the other people were engrossed in the movie. She rushed out, because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the darkness in her head.
And after that? I asked her.
A lot of darkness, she said.
But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?
In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest; and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers.
These are facts you find out later, though.
Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly; at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, a-spin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can’t be discounted.
Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.
The Taxi
“You have a pimple,” said the doctor.
I’d hoped nobody would notice.
“You’ve been picking it,” he went on.
When I’d woken that morning—early, so as to get to this appointment—the pimple had reached the stage of hard expectancy in which it begs to be picked. It was yearning for release. Freeing it from its little white dome, pressing until the blood ran, I felt a sense of accomplishment: I’d done all that could be done for this pimple.
“You’ve been picking at yourself,” the doctor said.
I nodded. He was going to keep talking about it until I agreed with him, so I nodded.
“Have a boyfriend?” he asked.
I nodded to this too.
“Trouble with the boyfriend?” It wasn’t a question, actually, he was already nodding for me. “Picking at yourself,” he repeated. He popped out from behind his desk and lunged toward me. He was a taut fat man, tight-bellied and dark.
“You need a rest,” he announced.
I did need a rest, particularly since I’d gotten up so early that morning in order to see this doctor, who lived out in the suburbs. I’d changed trains twice. And I would have to retrace my steps to get to my job. Just thinking of it made me tired.
“Don’t you think?” He was still standing in front of me. “Don’t you think you need a rest?”
“Yes,” I said.
He strode off to the adjacent room, where I could hear him talking on the phone.
I have thought often of the next ten minutes—my last ten minutes. I had the impulse, once, to get up and leave through the door I’d entered, to walk the several blocks to the trolley stop and wait for the train that would take me back to my troublesome boyfriend, my job at the kitchen store. But I was too tired.
He strutted back into the room, busy, pleased with himself.
“I’ve got a bed for you,” he said. “It’ll be a rest. Just for a couple of weeks, okay?” He sounded conciliatory, or pleading, and I was afraid.
“I’ll go Friday,” I said. It was Tuesday; maybe by Friday I wouldn’t want to go.
He bore down on me with his belly. “No. You go now.”
I thought this was unreasonable. “I have a lunch date,” I said.
“Forget it,” he said. “You aren’t going to lunch. You’re going to the hospital.” He looked triumphant.
It was very quiet out in the suburbs before eight in the morning. And neither of us had anything more to say. I heard the taxi pulling up in the doctor’s driveway.
He took me by the elbow—pinched me between his large stout fingers—and steered me outside. Keeping hold of my arm, he opened the back door of the taxi and pushed me in. His big head was in the backseat with me for a moment. Then he slammed the door shut.
The driver rolled his window down halfway.
“Where to?”
Coatless in the chilly morning, planted on his sturdy legs in his driveway, the doctor lifted one arm to point at me.