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 in
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.
