Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
Girl, Interrupted
by Susanna Kaysen
Vintage (1994)
ISBN-13: 978-0679746041
192 pp
In another of the string of female autobiographies I’ve reviewed comes one I’ve been eyeing for a while—Girl, Interrupted. Frequent readers will know I have my eye on film as much as literature and I just can’t help myself in letting my movie tastes guide my reading choice (and vice versa). It will come as no surprise that this feminist-child-of-the-90’s has had this modern Bell Jar on her To Do list for pretty much a decade. What made me shy away? Frankly, when you love a movie so much sometimes you are scared to read the book because 1) the book is usually better and knowing that your movie will soon be downgraded can be disheartening and 2) it’s hard to have to “pick” a favorite version and everyone will ask you to do so.
Well, readers, I hate to disappoint: there’s no choosing here. This book is so distinct from its famous film version that I have no problem loving both equally in their own way.
The film was one of Angelina Jolie’s early successes, garnering her an Oscar, Golden Globe and SAG award for Best Supporting Actress and it was also one of the last great things Winona Ryder did (hey, I loved her in Sim1ne but really, what has she been up to recently?) but so much of the plot for “Girl, Interrupted” was invented that the actual memoir just feels like a completely different story. James Mangold, the director, pretty much just stole the character names and a few buzzwords like “sociopath” and “anorexic” and ran with it—the actual memoir doesn’t have the “pizzazz” that the movie does (and that’s a good thing).
Mental illness often gets swept under the rug or, oddly, chalked up to a necessary condition of the artistic. How many times have people wondered if Plath or Woolf would be less compelling without their respective mental illnesses making them “more interesting”? How much of this is distinctly gendered toward women authors? These are all important questions; some of which Kaysen has the balls to tackle in this recounting of her two year stay at a Psychiatric Hospital. For most of the book I couldn’t tell what was really wrong with Kaysen that she required hospitalization—most of what she talks about (boredom, odd fixations, listlessness, depressive states) feels like well traveled territory for most people. Even Kaysen’s attempted suicide (via overdose) felt like a story I had read a hundred times--- but she makes me question why I’ve read it a hundred times. A student asked me once why we kept making “Romeo and Juliet” style stories with their sad endings and I responded quickly, “Because people keep making the same mistakes”--- how precise that answer was to the very questions I’ve posed about this genre of women’s mental health memoirs. Why do I keep reading the same story? Because it keeps happening.
Kaysen’s life, for me, was the saddest because it was the most typical—she simply didn’t want the life laid out for her like a uniform by her parents. But she felt like this wasn’t an escapable life—her school, her family, her community all felt the same way about how she should turn out and her desire to be even slightly off course was so counter-culture, so disturbing, that she had to be insane. That she had to be driven insane—insanity was the only explanation for her difference. Many of the other girls in the hospital seem to have exactly the same problem—the anorexic dancer’s body will never be good enough, the pathological liar’s reality will never be good enough, the sociopath’s heart will never be soft enough and so the girls have no choice but to be insane and embrace the full scope of their difference. Kaysen’s take on the mental hospitals is different than a Plath or a Cuckoo’s Nest because of her condition and its treatment: she doesn’t get shocks, she rarely gets highly medicated, and much of what she reports are her observations about her surroundings as she ponders both why she is there and if she will ever be really ready to get out. She wonders frequently about the definition of insanity and whether or not it is real---whether it is the chemicals in the brain or the voice of the mind that is flawed in some way, whether these things are tricks or treatable. The book reads like a monologue that is blended with copied pages from her hospital record and letters from her file—the hospital pages adding the effective dose of ethos.
Kaysen’s problem wasn’t just mental health, it was that she questioned society and what was “normal” – but when she was eighteen that wasn’t embraced or acceptable. Today we probably consider the types of things she went through (short of the suicide attempt) to be essential to being a thoughtful, aware female in the world—she questions her role, the expectations of her parents and peers, the educational and career system and their veiled attempt to “free” women from the home that she is destined to be chained it anyway. I highly suggest that anyone who thinks that women have “always” had it easy or that “feminism is dead” check out this book—more telling than a psychiatry check up is the statistic Kaysen wisely waits until the end of the memoir to deliver: that most of what they considered “psychiatric” conditions most of the time manifest in women. It’s as if she’s saying a truth we all hoped wasn’t true: that the world around us makes women insane and seems to show no sympathy in changing the world instead of the women.
Susanna Kaysen is an American memoirist best known for her autobiography
Interrupted about her two year stay in a Psychiatric Hospital in Massachusetts. She is the daughter of Carl Kaysen, former advisor to JFK. Her working bibliography also includes Asa, As I Knew Him, 1987, Far Afield, 1990, The Camera My Mother Gave Me, 2001, Cambridge (novel), 2014.
