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 documnet that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane mental illness and recovery.
