Girl, Interrupted, By Susanna Kaysen

ogical liar, a girl that is sexually abused, a girl that lit herself on fire, etc. She also tells of events: the visit of her boyfriend, a trip to the ice cream parlor, and of the times when her friend, Lisa, ran away. There is no plot, the book is simply a gathering of her observations from her inner self, other patients and their lives, and the world in that year in which Susanna’s life was interrupted, retold in a “darkly comedic” fashion. The language used is alternately funny, quirky, and sometimes brutally strong. Susanna describes her world at this time as a “parallel universe” often questioning if she is crazy and what it is that determines a person to be crazy. The book does not concentrate much on Susanna’s borderline personality disorder directly but allows the reader to draw the parallels between events in Susanna’s life and symptoms of the disorder.

Throughout the novel, Susanna has a clever way of avoiding why she was there. She was a “voluntary admission,” although she was obviously under great pressure from both family and the psychiatrist who admitted her. She acknowledges that she made a suicide attempt, although she saved herself by getting herself to a public area where she collapsed. And we don’t find out most of these details until towards the end of the book. In the beginning of the book, we are told that the psychiatrist seemed to focus on a pimple she had picked at that day. We have to wonder at first why he would make the call to have her admitted after examining a pimple. Although I later figured out that it was a suggestion at the time, that the psychiatrist wildly over-interpreted to get to a common symptom of her diagnosis borderline personality, self-mutilation. It isn’t until near the very end of the book she mentions that she also used to scratch her face and rub soap in the scratches to aggravate them and make them look worse. There is no real talk of her parents so I couldn’t tell you how her family affected her. Though she looks to her roommates in the ward to figure out if she is “crazy” or not. She stares at them, is c