Susanna Kaysen's memoir was originally published in 1993, but it portrays events from 1967 to 1969. Twenty-five years later, she hired a lawyer to get access to the medical records giving her diagnosis, and some of these are actually published in the book.

Each short chapter focuses on an aspect of her experience, though they are not always in a chronological order, but more as if she has written them just how she remembers them, explaining fully her story of the people she met and the treatment she received.

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

Within the two years at Mclean Susanna finds herself questioning the boundaries between confinement and freedom, friendship and betrayal, and madness and sanity at a time when it seemed the whole world was going crazy.

The book itself begins in 1967. Susanna Kaysen is an 18 year old; bored, neurotic, self-obsessed and given to little psycho-dramas to attract

Not long after Susanna arrives, Daisy boasts of the new apartment her father has bought her. When asked about her favourite part she speaks of the sign which reads, ‘If you lived here you’d be home’ which I believe shows how much these patients not only have this need for a home-base but also for a certain love and understanding, which usually is never found. Unfortunately Daisy is one who never finds that and she commits suicide.

She also runs into Lisa in Harvard Square one day. She’s still thin and yellow but now she has a three year old son and is working and going to temple. This part of the novel quite surprises me as Lisa was diagnosed as a sociopath, so I wonder how she would be successful in raising a child, I guess perhaps a sociopath might be able to bring up a child but from reading this story I don’t believe Lisa ever was one.

attention - in other words, a western-world teenager of privileged conditions, only perhaps a little more extreme than most. She isn’t clinically insane; the only treatment she needs is some basic behavior management and some simple attention from her parents.

Susanna's roommate, Georgina, was admitted after a tidal wave of darkness had broke over her head in a theater. When she realized no-one else was experiencing this sensation, she realized, to some extent, she must be crazy. Apart from Georgina, Susanna talks quite a bit about some of the other patients, among them a girl named Lisa.

Nearing the end of the novel Susanna also mentions her years after her release:

Some topics in this essay:
Lisa Cody, Lisa Lisa, Susanna Kaysen's, Colace Ex-Lax, Susanna Kaysen, Ray Charles, Harvard Square, Cambridge Mass, Lisa Susanna, Daisy Susanna, lisa cody, girl interrupted, girl named, thin yellow, girl interrupted music, interrupted music,