The bestselling book that inspired the cult classic film, Girl, Interrupted, starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie.
‘Not since Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar has a personal account of life in a mental hospital achieved as much popularity and acclaim’ TIME
‘Intelligent and painful’ Guardian
‘Poignant, astonishing memoir’ New York Times
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 to be treated for depression. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital renowned for its famous clientele – Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor and Ray Charles.
A clear-sighted, unflinching work that provokes questions about our definitions of sane and insane, Kaysen’s extraordinary memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers.
‘Not since Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar has a personal account of life in a mental hospital achieved as much popularity and acclaim’ TIME
‘Intelligent and painful’ Guardian
‘Poignant, astonishing memoir’ New York Times
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 to be treated for depression. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital renowned for its famous clientele – Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor and Ray Charles.
A clear-sighted, unflinching work that provokes questions about our definitions of sane and insane, Kaysen’s extraordinary memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers.
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Reviews
Not since Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar has a personal account of life in a mental hospital achieved as much popularity and acclaim
A cool, elegant and unexpectedly funny memoir
Girl, Interrupted is superb, poignant and more powerful for its lack of romantic inflation, whining, or self-congratulation
Girl, Interrupted is a beautiful, complex story that truly led the way on opening up a new, brave, nuanced approach to talking about women's mental health. It is an intense and personal story that taps into a universal truth about how the world responds to complicated young women
Intelligent and painful
Poignant, honest and triumphantly funny . . . A compelling and heartbreaking story
Memorable and stirring . . . Fascinating. A powerful examination not only of Kaysen's own imperfections but of those of the system that diagnosed her
