What is Girl, Interrupted about?
Girl, Interrupted is a memoir by Susanna Kaysen, published in 1993. It describes the two years — 1967 to 1969 — that Kaysen spent as a patient at McLean Hospital, a private psychiatric facility in Belmont, Massachusetts, after being admitted at age eighteen following a brief consultation with a psychiatrist she had never previously met. Kaysen was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. The memoir is not a linear narrative but a collection of short chapters — scenes, reflections, fragments of memory — that reconstruct her time on the ward, her relationships with the other women there, her eventual release, and her retrospective examination of what her diagnosis meant and how it was applied. Kaysen also includes photocopied pages from her medical records, which she obtained years after her release and which provide a clinical counterpoint to her own voice. The book raises questions about the line between sanity and madness, about the construction of mental illness as a category, and about what it meant for young women in 1960s America to be deemed mentally disturbed. It was adapted into a film in 1999 starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie.
What genre is Girl, Interrupted?
Girl, Interrupted is memoir — specifically the kind of fragmented, self-interrogating literary memoir that was common in the 1990s following the success of Mary Karr's The Liar's Club. It is not a confessional recovery narrative: Kaysen is not offering a story of illness and healing with a satisfying arc. The book is more analytical and critical than that — she is examining an experience and a diagnosis from the outside, asking what the category of "mentally ill" was being used to accomplish and who benefited from its application to young women like her. The book has also been read as a feminist text about the medicalization of female nonconformity in the 1960s. Readers who respond to Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, to Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, and to contemporary mental health memoirs often encounter Girl, Interrupted as an essential predecessor.
How many chapters are in Girl, Interrupted?
Girl, Interrupted summary
In the spring of 1967, Susanna Kaysen, eighteen years old, took fifty aspirin and walked outside until she fainted. She did not present this to the psychiatrist she was subsequently sent to see as a serious suicide attempt; she was not sure herself that it was. After a twenty-minute appointment, the psychiatrist — someone her family knew — recommended she be admitted to McLean Hospital. She agreed, thinking she would be there for a few weeks.
She stayed for two years.
McLean was, in the 1960s, an institution that housed the quietly unwell daughters of the New England upper-middle class alongside the more severely disturbed. Kaysen's ward, Two West, was home to a rotating cast of young women with various diagnoses: depression, schizophrenia, personality disorders. The staff maintained the ward's routines with a combination of watchfulness and pharmaceuticals. Privileges — the ability to go outdoors, to have sharp objects, to go off-grounds — were granted and revoked based on behavior.
The book's most vivid figures are the other patients. Lisa is the ward's dominant personality: charismatic, manipulative, diagnosed as a sociopath, repeatedly attempting escape and being returned. She exerts a fascination over the other patients, including Kaysen, that is as destructive as it is compelling. Georgina is Kaysen's roommate, sane enough to observe everything, calm and intelligent. Polly was burned and is beautiful in a terrifying way. Daisy keeps rotisserie chickens in her room and goes home for Christmas only to be found dead shortly after her release.
Kaysen documents the small textures of institutional life: the checks every fifteen minutes through the night, the medications, the therapy sessions, the particular boredom of a place where time moves differently. She is also thinking continuously about the question that the book circles but never entirely answers: was she ill? What does it mean to be ill? Her diagnosis — borderline personality disorder — is a category she examines in detail in several chapters, noting that its criteria are broad and its application to young women was at the time extremely common.
She is released in 1969. The release is abrupt and not particularly supported. She goes out into a world that has changed considerably — the late 1960s, the movements, the general destabilization of the society she left — and makes her way.
How does Girl, Interrupted end?
The book does not end with a dramatic resolution or a recovery narrative. Kaysen is released; she goes out into the world; she survives. In her account the release was managed almost as casually as the admission — she was declared ready and sent home. The chapters following the release reflect on what she found: the world changed, the difficulty of reentry, the strangeness of being a person with this particular past.
In one of the book's most important later chapters, Kaysen obtains her medical records from McLean decades after her release. Reading the clinical descriptions of herself at eighteen — the language of disorder, incompetence, instability — she is both disturbed and analytical about it. She does not entirely dispute the records but does not entirely accept them either. The book ends not with answers but with a refusal of the question as framed: she is not arguing she was healthy or sick, sane or mad. She is arguing that the categories themselves require examination, and that the experience of being placed inside them was something no diagnostic language fully captures.
Key people in Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen — The author and narrator, eighteen when admitted to McLean, writing from the distance of decades. Her voice is cool, ironic, and precise — she brings the same intelligence to examining her past self that she brings to examining her diagnosis.
Lisa — A fellow patient, diagnosed as a sociopath, who dominates the ward's social dynamics through charisma and ruthlessness. She is one of the memoir's most fully realized figures and is genuinely dangerous.
Georgina — Kaysen's roommate, steady and observant. Her presence provides a stable counterpoint to the ward's more volatile characters.
Daisy — A patient who goes home for the holidays and is found dead shortly after. Her death is one of the book's most affecting moments and one that Kaysen returns to more than once.
Polly — A patient who was badly burned and who bears the physical marks of it. Her presence raises questions about damage and identity that Kaysen examines carefully.
The nurses and doctors — Present throughout but relatively undifferentiated; Kaysen is more interested in the patients and in the structure of the institution than in individual staff members.
Quotes from Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
Susanna Kaysen's prose in Girl, Interrupted is spare and precisely observed — the voice of a writer who has had a long time to think about what she is describing.
"Crazy isn't being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It's you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever."
"I told her once I wasn't good at anything. She told me survival is a talent."
"Suicide is a form of murder — premeditated murder. It isn't something you do the first time you think of doing it. It takes getting used to. And you need the means, the opportunity, the motive."
Frequently asked questions
Is Girl, Interrupted a true story?
Yes. Girl, Interrupted is a memoir — a non-fiction account of Susanna Kaysen's actual experience as a patient at McLean Hospital from 1967 to 1969. The events she describes are based on her own memory and, crucially, on the medical records she obtained from McLean decades after her release. She incorporates photocopied pages from those records into the text. The other patients she describes — Lisa, Georgina, Daisy, Polly — were real people; she changed some names. Daisy's death is documented. The book is Kaysen's account of her own experience and should be read as such, with the understanding that all memoir involves selection and interpretation.
What does the title Girl, Interrupted mean?
The title comes from a Vermeer painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music, which depicts a young woman who has paused in the middle of playing an instrument to look at something or someone outside the frame. Kaysen uses it as a metaphor for her own experience — she was a young woman whose life was interrupted, paused, by the two years she spent at McLean. The title also carries a slight ambiguity: "interrupted" can mean paused or disrupted, but it also carries a suggestion of something cut short or not allowed to complete itself. In the book's analysis of her diagnosis, this ambiguity is appropriate.
What is borderline personality disorder in Girl, Interrupted?
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) was the diagnosis in Kaysen's medical records. The DSM criteria for BPD at the time included instability of mood, impulsivity, self-destructive behavior, and difficulty in relationships. Kaysen devotes a chapter to examining these criteria against her own behavior and finding that many of them describe experiences common to most people, particularly most young women in destabilizing circumstances. She is not arguing against the existence of mental illness but is questioning how this particular diagnosis was applied — and to whom. The category of BPD was at the time disproportionately applied to young women.
How does the Girl, Interrupted film compare to the book?
The 1999 film directed by James Mangold, with Winona Ryder as Kaysen and Angelina Jolie as Lisa, is considerably more dramatic and plot-driven than the memoir. The book is fragmentary, analytical, and relatively quiet; the film gives it a more conventional narrative arc centered on the Kaysen-Lisa relationship and ending with a clearer sense of resolution and recovery. Jolie's Lisa became one of her most celebrated performances, earning her an Academy Award. Most readers who encountered the book after the film found it substantially different — more interior, more questioning, less interested in events than in what the events mean.
Is Girl, Interrupted appropriate for younger readers?
Girl, Interrupted is written for adult readers. It discusses suicide, self-harm, psychiatric institutionalization, and death with directness and without resolution. It is generally recommended for readers 16 and up, and works well in high school literature and psychology classes with appropriate discussion. The book does not glorify mental illness or self-harm but examines them analytically, which requires some maturity to process. Teachers and parents who assign or recommend it to younger readers should be prepared to discuss its themes.
What happened to Susanna Kaysen after Girl, Interrupted?
After her release from McLean in 1969, Kaysen worked as a writer and published several books. Girl, Interrupted (1993) was her second book and became her most widely read. She has also published a novel, Asa, As I Knew Him (1987), and Far Afield (1990). She has kept a lower public profile than the memoir's success might suggest — she has given relatively few interviews and has written little publicly about the memoir's reception or about the film adaptation. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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