Girl, Interrupted

“One of the most essential pieces of McLean art. I never read nonfiction, even memoir, but this book is incredibly special. Heartfelt and phenomenally written. A sacred text.”

“A memoir of a girl institutionalized for Borderline Personality Disorder in the 60s. I know Kaysen is trying to avoid clean explanations for her psychosis, and maybe this is because I recently read My Dark Vanessa, but in my non-psychiatric opinion, it's chilling to me that her "affair" with her high school English teacher goes unexplored in relation to her suicide attempt less than a year later -- it's completely absent from the book, other than "this happened to me." The other (non-schizophrenic) female patients in Girl, Interrupted had stories like that too, earth-shattering incidents and relationships from their lives that go unexplored in favor of medication, diagnosis, and institutionalization. Kaysen is torn about whether or not she's "crazy," goes point-by-point on the characteristics of "crazy," and while she definitely seems to be suffering for many reasons, English teacher among others, the scariest parts of the book are not the supposedly "crazy" women, but how little humanity the world grants them.”