Acclaim for Susanna Kaysen’s

Girl, Interrupted

 

“A bitter, funny, insightful memoir … A minimalist relative of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kaysen’s spare, elegant book raises angry questions about just who’s crazy, and who’s in charge of figuring it out.”

—Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Written [in] bare-bones prose, funny, readable and true. The great success of Girl, Interrupted is that it avoids the romantic inflation that most other sufferers of psychosis fall into when they describe their experience. Kaysen simply lets us know, with spare poetry, what it is like to have a life interrupted by madness.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“In piercing vignettes shadowed with humor [Kaysen] brings to life the routine of the ward and its patients.… Kaysen’s meditations on young women and madness form a trenchant counterpoint to the copies of her medical records that are woven into the text.”

—The New Yorker

“An eloquent and unexpectedly funny memoir.”

—Vanity Fair

“At turns wry, sardonic, witty … an unusual glimpse of a young woman’s experience with insanity. Kaysen presents a meaningful analysis of the dual and contradictory nature of psychiatric hospitalization as both refuge and prison.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Nothing short of astonishing … unusually frank and thoughtful … Girl, Interrupted [gives] a piercing sense of how very short is the journey from humor to outright horror … remarkable.”

—Mirabella

“Memorable and stirring … fascinating. A powerful examination not only of Kaysen’s own imperfections but of those of the system that diagnosed her.”

—Vogue

“Girl, Interrupted is a writer’s book, crafted by an author of extraordinary acuteness and skill. Kaysen takes us across the boundaries of ‘normalcy.’ Girl, Interrupted is about the borders between the world inside the hospital and the world outside, between sanity and insanity, between freedom and captivity, between self and other, between dignity and shame, between power and powerlessness.”

—Boston Phoenix Literary Section

“Remarkable … In prose lean and mean, Kaysen’s memoir brings us inside [McLean] and paints a picture of madness that is both disturbing and compelling.”

—Detroit News

“Using herself as a troubled—and troubling—example, Kaysen demonstrates with excoriating humor the severe problems with diagnosis, the phenomenon of psychiatric hospitalization and the callousness of even the most sophisticated of families and hospitals. Girl, Interrupted is more than a ’60s period piece. It is a cautionary tale for our time, for any era struggling to balance on the razor’s edge between sanity and insanity.”

—St. Louis Post Dispatch

“Susanna Kaysen’s candid memoir of her stay in a psychiatric hospital breaks the mold. It is both funny and frightening. Kaysen’s account is provocative, concise writing with an occasional edge of black humor. It makes us examine our own minds and wonder just who has the right to decide if someone has gone mad.”

—St. Petersburg Times

“Girl, Interrupted is Ms. Kaysen’s sly, witty memoir [in] which she writes vividly pf the McLean community in the late ’60s: beleaguered nurses, ineffective doctors, obsessed patients. Kaysen finds her reality in writing, inside.”

—Atlanta Journal-Constitution