description: At the age of eighteen Susanna Kaysen was committed to a psychiatric hospital by a doctor she had seen only once. For the next two years she lived on the ward for teenage girls at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution as reknowned for its celebrity patients -- among them, 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 the horror and the humor of the parallel universe she enters, using her razor-edged perception to present vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers in the keleidoscopically shifting landscape of the 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.
language: English
title: Girl, Interrupted
titlecomplete: Girl, Interrupted
characters: Susanna Kaysen
genres: Biography, Mental Health, Memoir, Nonfiction, Psychology, Classics, Autobiography, Contemporary, Biography Memoir, Mental Illness
ratings_count: 232432
places: Massachusetts
publisher: Vintage Books USA