Summary Of Girl Interrupted By Susanna Kaysen

Are you crazy? It is a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me: the tunnels, the security screens, the plastic forks, the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed. I do not want to cross it again" Published in 1993, Susanna Kaysen's homodiegetic narrative memoir, Girl Interrupted, recounts her short residency experience in a psychiatric hospital. In a paradoxical world, where crazy is normal, Susanna Kaysen, pontificates on what makes a person sane. Taken place in the 1960's, a doctor diagnoses Susanna Kaysen, with borderline personality disorder after she attempted to commit suicide by overdosing on medication. Rapidly altering her future, Kaysen voluntarily admits

Analyzing her friends, with different mental illnesses she begins to understand their turmoil. Throughout the story, Kaysen experiences acute incidents of depersonalization where she has an anomaly of self-awareness. She develops a hysterical fixation with the substantiation of this proposed realism. Kaysen depicts her struggles and understands that you have to get worse before you get better. Kaysen describes the institution as a safe haven but also a prison. This lead to her revelations on what freedom is, and "freedom was the price of privacy". She comes to terms that she was not truly crazy but that the world made her feel artificial. She realizes that others are not as fortunate, and are incurable. Concluding her memoir, she speaks of the patients she met during her visit that helped her grasp that you can be eccentric and quirky, but still

A rich, complex story Kaysen tries to execute is choppy and presented in an uninteresting manner. Her plot is sporadic causing Kaysen to provide readers with a limited amount of detail. Kaysen endowed overly worded random short excerpts. Briefly, a reader could become interested because all chapters were fleetingly touched. Kaysen's, harsh and direct writing style makes it hard to establish a personal connection unless you too have faced mental illness. Occasionally, I asked myself "Why am I reading this." The memoir was superficial, because Kaysen strives too hard to analyze why she believed her attempted suicide was metaphorical. The message was unclear, and throughout the entire book she attempts to justify why she is not crazy. This critic believes that Kaysen needs to take an expedition back to Mclean hospital after she begins to rant "Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers." In term, Kaysen provides a strange, but thought-provoking insight. Even though I wished she written a more detailed memoir, I commend Kaysen, for sharing her experiences as a mentally deranged woman. Ultimately, to appreciate the perception, Susanna Kaysen, provides depends on how you define