#17: Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

 Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

In 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. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles--as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.

Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

169 pages

First published January 1, 1993

Selection #17: March 01, 2023 - April 30, 2023

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5/7/23: We have been reading this one for our March-April selection and will be meeting tonight at Jodi's to finish it up with our discussion and movie watching. 

MINUTES: 

5/7/23: To keep up with our pacing, I decided to move through this movie viewing without feeling the need to prepare too much. We still had a printout of discussion questions to use as a guide and we had a lot of things to say about the differences between the book and the film, and there are many. We met at Jodi's house, just the two of us, on this night. I failed to procure a rotisserie chicken for the meeting but let the record show that would have been the only acceptable food stuff to utilize for this selection. 

REFLECTIONS: 

I seemed to have a hangup on the end where Susanna has an encounter with Lisa, focusing on her having a three year old in tow. Jodi seemed frustrated I could not come to terms with this, rightfully noting that plenty of crazy people parent children every day. While this is true, my point to process was that Lisa also frequented Temple and was in contact with her parents, not only differing greatly from her character throughout the book, who was diagnosed as a sociopath, but drastically differing from the ending of the movie where she is painted almost as Nancy from The Craft, in her derangement, seemingly more so a psychopath. The book does not have her playing this part of the villain so much as she ultimately plays in the movie, but it's still jarring that she is with a child at the end. It almost adds clout to our joint wonderings on the state of these patients, knowing that McLean was filled with rich people's kids, were these not mostly the stories of psychological rebellion stemming from parental neglect? This leaves a lot up for musing, because what is the nature of mental illness? Susanna learns her diagnosis in the movie, while in the book she does not learn that she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder until years later, in the book. So she is unaware of what the diagnosis suggests until she seeks out a DSM from a local book store many years after the fact. Then she finds herself, or at least the self that they identified her as when she was 18 and then she writes the book. And in our discussion, does this justify her treatment or admission to McLean? What is BPD? Is it not oddly similar to justifiable coming of age problems that are normal for certain age groups? We discussed how the DSM, in actuality, is nothing more than a group of (mostly) men in a room, looking at patterns of behavior and collectively creating terms for them. So how much clout should this book and its diagnoses even be given? There is a discrepancy in the psychology world over this diagnosis, even. Some therapists don't like to touch BPD patients and will send them elsewhere, while others do not even believe in the diagnosis. This was a time when I would actually rate the movie higher than the book, and we can see why they added to it, as the book was fairly anticlimactic. But leads me to question, is it okay to add fiction to a nonfiction memoir? Also, all parents are missing from this book aside from Daisy's father, who brings her the chicken, you could say. This almost highlights my belief that attachment theory and parenting plays an integral yet absent role in all of this. It opens up that can of worms and line of questioning: what is the nature of mental illness?