Girl, Interrupted

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * 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. Her memoir of the next two years is a poignant, honest … triumphantly funny … and heartbreaking story (The New York Times Book Review).

The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was 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.