At the age of eighteen Susanna Kaysen was committed to a psychiatric hospital by a doctor she had seen only once. For the next two years she lived on the ward for teenage girls at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution as reknowned for its celebrity patients -- among them, 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 the horror and the humor of the "parallel universe" she enters, using her razor-edged perception to present vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers in the keleidoscopically shifting landscape of the sixties. "Girl, Interrupted" is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

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Books > Biography & Autobiography > Specific Groups - Special Needs
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