Girl, Interrupted - Softcover

Mangold, James

4.05

296 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 057120211X ISBN 13: 9780571202119

Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2000

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Cult movie heroine Winona Ryder starred in the film of the best-selling book by Susanna Kaysen, adapted and directed by the creator of Copland and Heavy. Girl, Interrupted charts the experiences of eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen as she is suddenly - and without warning - incarcerated in a mental hospital, then made to spend the next two years of her life in a ward reserved for teenage girls, within an institution renowned for its famous clientele: Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, Ray Charles. Mangold's adaptation of Kaysen's extraordinary memoir is unsettling but unflinching, funny but deeply poignant.

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Review:

Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted is the autobiographical story of the author's time in a psychiatric award in 1967. Sylvia Plath was a patient at the same hospital in the early 1950s so inevitably comparisons have been made between Plath's The Bell Jar and Kaysen's novel--both recounting a young woman's descent into insanity. This, however, is where the similarities end--The Bell Jar is a haunting and lyrical book; Girl, Interrupted is a more hard-edged, documentary-style narrative. It has none of the beauty and poetry of Plath's prose and is more akin to Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation , an up-to-date memoir of a young girl's struggle with depression and drugs. Both these books offer a brutal and stark image of a life of mental illness.

Kaysen's account goes further and questions the standard notions of sanity and insanity. Her plausible voice allows the reader to accept a world where time is distorted, chaos reigns and questions are left unanswered, capturing perfectly the sense of helplessness and frustration felt by these women. The book's gritty realism is also heightened by copies of the author's original medical reports lodged between the chapters.

However, it is her penetrating insights into those around her, from those cared for to the caretakers, that make "Girl, Interrupted" so potent. Lacing her narrative with a hard-edged, sardonic sting, she introduces us to a cast of characters from the outrageous Lisa to the chicken-hoarding Daisy to the Martian's girlfriend:

Daisy was a seasonal event. She came before Thanksgiving and stayed through Christmas every year ... "Would anyone like to share?" the head nurse asked ... "Me! Me! Somebody who was a Martian's girlfriend and also had a little penis of her own, which she was eager to show off, raised a hand; nobody wanted to share with her.

"Girl, Interrupted" is a credible and creditable chronicle of the lives of women in the 1960s who, through the ignorance and narrow-mindedness of society, were contained and monitored for not fitting into the "norm", the mainstream. Nicola Perry

Review:

"Poignant, honest and triumphantly funny. . . �a� compelling and heartbreaking story." --Susan Cheever, "The New York Times Book Review"
"Tough-minded . . . darkly comic . . . written with indelible clarity."--"Newsweek"
"�A�n account of a disturbed girl's unwilling passage into womanhood...and here is the girl, looking into our faces with urgent eyes."--Diane Middlebrook, "Washington Post Book World"

" Poignant, honest and triumphantly funny. . . [a] compelling and heartbreaking story." --Susan Cheever, "The New York Times Book Review"
" Tough-minded . . . darkly comic . . . written with indelible clarity." --"Newsweek"
" [A]n account of a disturbed girl's unwilling passage into womanhood...and here is the girl, looking into our faces with urgent eyes." --Diane Middlebrook, "Washington Post Book World"

"Poignant, honest and triumphantly funny. . . [a] compelling and heartbreaking story." --Susan Cheever, The New York Times Book Review

"Tough-minded . . . darkly comic . . . written with indelible clarity."--Newsweek

"[A]n account of a disturbed girl's unwilling passage into womanhood...and here is the girl, looking into our faces with urgent eyes."--Diane Middlebrook, Washington Post Book World

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