Description

By (author) Kaysen, Susanna

Short /annotation:
The bestselling cult classic memoir, now a BookTok favourite, reissued as part of the new Virago Modern Classic ”Green Spines” design.

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Crazy isn”t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It”s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.

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. Unflinchingly honest and darkly funny, this bestselling memoir is a sharply vivid portrait of Susanna”s fellow patients, the kaleidoscopically shifting world of the late sixties, and how sometimes the only way to stay sane is to go a little crazy.

”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. An intense and personal story that taps into a universal truth about how the world responds to complicated young women” SCARLETT CURTIS

”Poignant, honest and triumphantly funny . . . A compelling and heartbreaking story” NEW YORK TIMES

”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

”A cool, elegant and unexpectedly funny memoir” SUNDAY TIMES

”Memorable and stirring” VOGUE

Review quote:
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

Review quote:
Poignant, honest and triumphantly funny . . . A compelling and heartbreaking story

Review quote:
A cool, elegant and unexpectedly funny memoir

Review quote:
Memorable and stirring . . . Fascinating. A powerful examination not only of Kaysen”s own imperfections but of those of the system that diagnosed her

Review quote:
Not since Sylvia Plath”s The Bell Jar has a personal account of life in a mental hospital achieved as much popularity and acclaim

Review quote:
Intelligent and painful

Review quote:
Girl, Interrupted is superb, poignant and more powerful for its lack of romantic inflation, whining, or self-congratulation

Biographical note:
Susanna Kaysen (1948) was brought up in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she still lives. She has written two novels, ASA, AS I KNEW HIM and FAR AFIELD. While working on the latter, memories of her two year stay at McLean”s Psychiatric Hospital began to emerge. With the help of a lawyer she obtained her 350 page file from the hospital. GIRL, INTERRUPTED followed.

Primary cover copy:

Crazy isn”t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It”s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.