Susanna Kaysen - Girl, Interrupted

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. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital 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.

Susanna Kaysen

ePub r1.0

Watcher 30.12.16

Original title: Girl, Interrupted

Susanna Kaysen, 1993

Cover design: Watcher

Digital editor: Watcher

ePub base r1.2

For Ingrid and Sanford

People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I cant answer the real question. All I can tell them is, Its easy.

And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.

My roommate Georgina came in swiftly and totally, during her junior year at Vassar. She was in a theater watching a movie when a tidal wave of blackness broke over her head. The entire world was obliteratedfor a few minutes. She knew she had gone crazy. She looked around the theater to see if it had happened to everyone, but all the other people were engrossed in the movie. She rushed out, because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the darkness in her head.

And after that? I asked her.

A lot of darkness, she said.

But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?

In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest; and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers.

These are facts you find out later, though.

Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly; at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, a-spin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it cant be discounted.

Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

You have a pimple, said the doctor.

Id hoped nobody would notice.

Youve been picking it, he went on.

When Id woken that morningearly, so as to get to this appointmentthe pimple had reached the stage of hard expectancy in which it begs to be picked. It was yearning for release. Freeing it from its little white dome, pressing until the blood ran, I felt a sense of accomplishment: Id done all that could be done for this pimple.

Youve been picking at yourself, the doctor said.

I nodded. He was going to keep talking about it until I agreed with him, so I nodded.

Have a boyfriend? he asked.

I nodded to this too.

Trouble with the boyfriend? It wasnt a question, actually, he was already nodding for me. Picking at yourself, he repeated. He popped out from behind his desk and lunged toward me. He was a taut fat man, tight-bellied and dark.

You need a rest, he announced.

I did need a rest, particularly since Id gotten up so early that morning in order to see this doctor, who lived out in the suburbs. Id changed trains twice. And I would have to retrace my steps to get to my job. Just thinking of it made me tired.

Dont you think? He was still standing in front of me. Dont you think you need a rest?

Yes, I said.

He strode off to the adjacent room, where I could hear him talking on the phone.

I have thought often of the next ten minutesmy last ten minutes. I had the impulse, once, to get up and leave through the door Id entered, to walk the several blocks to the trolley stop and wait for the train that would take me back to my troublesome boyfriend, my job at the kitchen store. But I was too tired.

He strutted back into the room, busy, pleased with himself.

Ive got a bed for you, he said. Itll be a rest. Just for a couple of weeks, okay? He sounded conciliatory, or pleading, and I was afraid.

Ill go Friday, I said. It was Tuesday; maybe by Friday I wouldnt want to go.

He bore down on me with his belly. No. You go now.

I thought this was unreasonable. I have a lunch date, I said.

Forget it, he said. You arent going to lunch. Youre going to the hospital. He looked triumphant.

It was very quiet out in the suburbs before eight in the morning. And neither of us had anything more to say. I heard the taxi pulling up in the doctors driveway.

He took me by the elbowpinched me between his large stout fingersand steered me outside. Keeping hold of my arm, he opened the back door of the taxi and pushed me in. His big head was in the backseat with me for a moment. Then he slammed the door shut.

The driver rolled his window down halfway.

Where to?

Coatless in the chilly morning, planted on his sturdy legs in his driveway, the doctor lifted one arm to point at me.

Take her to McLean, he said, and dont let her out till you get there.

I let my head fall back against the seat and shut my eyes. I was glad to be riding in a taxi instead of having to wait for the train.

This person is (pick one):

1. on a perilous journey from which we can learn much when he or she returns;

2. possessed by (pick one):

a) the gods,

b) God (that is, a prophet),

c) some bad spirits, demons, or devils,

d) the Devil;

3. a witch;

4. bewitched (variant of 2);

5. bad, and must be isolated and punished;

6. ill, and must be isolated and treated by (pick one):

a) purging and leeches,

b) removing the uterus if the person has one,

c) electric shock to the brain,