Girl, Interrupted

The prose style in the memoir, Girl, Interrupted, is clean, concise, and unembellished. The spare writing leaves no room for self-pity, yet still tells a vivid story of mental unraveling and convalescence concurrently. Kaysen meets a cast of vulnerable characters during her nearly year-long commitment in a psychiatric hospital. They form unlikely friendships, and we get to know all of their various neuroses in a stifling environment that is at once a cage and a path to self-discovery and health. 

I was reminded of my own two commitments to psychiatric hospitals, how strange and austere the world became in… show more.

Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, about the two years she spent confined to a mental institution by a doctor who’d only ever spent 15 minutes with her, is about how society determines who gets to walk free and who cannot. This is an interesting question in itself, but what moved me most was the book’s exploration of relationships between girls: their alliances and feuds, the ways they hurt each other, and the ways they help, holding one another up in the hardest of circumstances. For it’s Kaysen’s fellow patients—including the defiant, unpredictable Lisa, the gentle, self-immolating Polly, and the know-it-all, true blue… show more.

Over the last twenty years, several memoirs have been written about an author’s experience with BPD. This is one of the first. The author describes her struggles at a time when BPD was not well understood and before focused treatment programs were developed. Her experience in a renowned hospital describes her suffering and that of other psychiatric patients she encounters there. The book also illustrates how some caretakers misunderstand and mistreat patients.