Girl, Interrupted Read online

  Acclaim for Susanna Kaysen’s

  Girl, Interrupted

  “A bitter, funny, insightful memoir … A minimalist relative of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Kaysen’s spare, elegant book raises angry questions about just who’s crazy, and who’s in charge of figuring it out.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Written [in] bare-bones prose, funny, readable and true. The great success of Girl, Interrupted is that it avoids the romantic inflation that most other sufferers of psychosis fall into when they describe their experience. Kaysen simply lets us know, with spare poetry, what it is like to have a life interrupted by madness.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “In piercing vignettes shadowed with humor [Kaysen] brings to life the routine of the ward and its patients.… Kaysen’s meditations on young women and madness form a trenchant counterpoint to the copies of her medical records that are woven into the text.”

  —The New Yorker

  “An eloquent and unexpectedly funny memoir.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “At turns wry, sardonic, witty … an unusual glimpse of a young woman’s experience with insanity. Kaysen presents a meaningful analysis of the dual and contradictory nature of psychiatric hospitalization as both refuge and prison.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Nothing short of astonishing … unusually frank and thoughtful … Girl, Interrupted [gives] a piercing sense of how very short is the journey from humor to outright horror … remarkable.”

  —Mirabella

  “Memorable and stirring … fascinating. A powerful examination not only of Kaysen’s own imperfections but of those of the system that diagnosed her.”

  —Vogue

  “Girl, Interrupted is a writer’s book, crafted by an author of extraordinary acuteness and skill. Kaysen takes us across the boundaries of ‘normalcy.’ Girl, Interrupted is about the borders between the world inside the hospital and the world outside, between sanity and insanity, between freedom and captivity, between self and other, between dignity and shame, between power and powerlessness.”

  —Boston Phoenix Literary Section

  “Remarkable … In prose lean and mean, Kaysen’s memoir brings us inside [McLean] and paints a picture of madness that is both disturbing and compelling.”

  —Detroit News

  “Using herself as a troubled—and troubling—example, Kaysen demonstrates with excoriating humor the severe problems with diagnosis, the phenomenon of psychiatric hospitalization and the callousness of even the most sophisticated of families and hospitals. Girl, Interrupted is more than a ’60s period piece. It is a cautionary tale for our time, for any era struggling to balance on the razor’s edge between sanity and insanity.”

  —St. Louis Post Dispatch

  “Susanna Kaysen’s candid memoir of her stay in a psychiatric hospital breaks the mold. It is both funny and frightening. Kaysen’s account is provocative, concise writing with an occasional edge of black humor. It makes us examine our own minds and wonder just who has the right to decide if someone has gone mad.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Girl, Interrupted is Ms. Kaysen’s sly, witty memoir [in] which she writes vividly pf the McLean community in the late ’60s: beleaguered nurses, ineffective doctors, obsessed patients. Kaysen finds her reality in writing, inside.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  Susanna Kaysen

  Girl, Interrupted

  Susanna Kaysen is also the author of the novels Asa, As I Knew Him and Far Afield. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Books by Susanna Kaysen

  Asa, As I Knew Him

  Far Afield

  Girl, Interrupted

  First Vintage Books Edition, June 1994

  Copyright © 1993 by Susanna Kaysen

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Turtle Bay Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 1993.

  Portions of this book, in slightly different form, appeared in Agni, The Boston Review, and Ploughshares.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to American Psychiatric Press for permission to reprint the entry for Borderline Personality Disorder from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition, Revised, Washington, D.C., American Psychiatric Association, 1987. Reprinted by permission.

  The author is grateful to the Artists Foundation of Massachusetts and the Corporation of Yaddo for their generosity.

  Though this book is nonfiction, some of the names and distinguishing traits of patients, doctors, and staff have been changed.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kaysen, Susanna, 1948–

  Girl, interrupted / Susanna Kaysen.—1st Vintage Books ed.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York: Turtle Bay Books, 1993.

  eISBN: 978-0-8041-5111-5

  1. Kaysen, Susanna, 1948—Mental health. 2. Psychiatric hospital patients—Massachusetts—Biography. I. Title

  RC464.K36A3 1994

  616.89′ 0092—dc20

  [B] 93-43339

  Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger

  v3.1_r1

  For Ingrid and Sanford

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Toward a Topography of the Parallel Universe

  The Taxi

  Etiology

  Fire

  Freedom

  The Secret of Life

  Politics

  If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now

  My Suicide

  Elementary Topography

  Applied Topography

  The Prelude to Ice Cream

  Ice Cream

  Checks

  Sharps

  Another Lisa

  Checkmate

  Do You Believe Him or Me?

  Velocity vs. Viscosity

  Security Screen

  Keepers

  Nineteen Sixty-Eight

  Bare Bones

  Dental Health

  Calais Is Engraved on My Heart

  The Shadow of the Real

  Stigmatography

  New Frontiers in Dental Health

  Topography of the Future

  Mind vs. Brain

  Borderline Personality Disorder

  My Diagnosis

  Farther on, Down the Road, You Will Accompany Me

  Girl, Interrupted

  Acknowledgments

  Toward a Topography of the Parallel Universe

  People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It’s easy.

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

  My roommate Georgina came in swiftly and totally, during her junior year at Vassar. She was in a theater watching a movie when a tidal wave of blackness broke over her head. The entire world was obliterated—for a few minutes. She knew she had gone crazy. She looked around the theater to see if it had happened to everyone, but all the other people were engrossed in the movie. She rushed out, because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the
darkness in her head.

  And after that? I asked her.

  A lot of darkness, she said.

  But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?

  In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest; and not every action can be counted on to provoke an equal and opposite reaction. Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers.

  These are facts you find out later, though.

  Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easily see the world you came from. Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly; at other times it is miniaturized and alluring, a-spin and shining in its orbit. Either way, it can’t be discounted.

  Every window on Alcatraz has a view of San Francisco.

  The Taxi

  “You have a pimple,” said the doctor.

  I’d hoped nobody would notice.

  “You’ve been picking it,” he went on.

  When I’d woken that morning—early, so as to get to this appointment—the pimple had reached the stage of hard expectancy in which it begs to be picked. It was yearning for release. Freeing it from its little white dome, pressing until the blood ran, I felt a sense of accomplishment: I’d done all that could be done for this pimple.

  “You’ve been picking at yourself,” the doctor said.

  I nodded. He was going to keep talking about it until I agreed with him, so I nodded.

  “Have a boyfriend?” he asked.

  I nodded to this too.

  “Trouble with the boyfriend?” It wasn’t a question, actually, he was already nodding for me. “Picking at yourself,” he repeated. He popped out from behind his desk and lunged toward me. He was a taut fat man, tight-bellied and dark.

  “You need a rest,” he announced.

  I did need a rest, particularly since I’d gotten up so early that morning in order to see this doctor, who lived out in the suburbs. I’d changed trains twice. And I would have to retrace my steps to get to my job. Just thinking of it made me tired.

  “Don’t you think?” He was still standing in front of me. “Don’t you think you need a rest?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He strode off to the adjacent room, where I could hear him talking on the phone.

  I have thought often of the next ten minutes—my last ten minutes. I had the impulse, once, to get up and leave through the door I’d entered, to walk the several blocks to the trolley stop and wait for the train that would take me back to my troublesome boyfriend, my job at the kitchen store. But I was too tired.

  He strutted back into the room, busy, pleased with himself.

  “I’ve got a bed for you,” he said. “It’ll be a rest. Just for a couple of weeks, okay?” He sounded conciliatory, or pleading, and I was afraid.

  “I’ll go Friday,” I said. It was Tuesday; maybe by Friday I wouldn’t want to go.

  He bore down on me with his belly. “No. You go now.”

  I thought this was unreasonable. “I have a lunch date,” I said.

  “Forget it,” he said. “You aren’t going to lunch. You’re going to the hospital.” He looked triumphant.

  It was very quiet out in the suburbs before eight in the morning. And neither of us had anything more to say. I heard the taxi pulling up in the doctor’s driveway.

  He took me by the elbow—pinched me between his large stout fingers—and steered me outside. Keeping hold of my arm, he opened the back door of the taxi and pushed me in. His big head was in the backseat with me for a moment. Then he slammed the door shut.

  The driver rolled his window down halfway.

  “Where to?”

  Coatless in the chilly morning, planted on his sturdy legs in his driveway, the doctor lifted one arm to point at me.

  “Take her to McLean,” he said, “and don’t let her out till you get there.”

  I let my head fall back against the seat and shut my eyes. I was glad to be riding in a taxi instead of having to wait for the train.

  Etiology

  This person is (pick one):

  1. on a perilous journey from which we can learn much when he or she returns;

  2. possessed by (pick one):

  a) the gods,

  b) God (that is, a prophet),

  c) some bad spirits, demons, or devils,

  d) the Devil;

  3. a witch;

  4. bewitched (variant of 2);

  5. bad, and must be isolated and punished;

  6. ill, and must be isolated and treated by (pick one):

  a) purging and leeches,

  b) removing the uterus if the person has one,

  c) electric shock to the brain,

  d) cold sheets wrapped tight around the body,

  e) Thorazine or Stelazine;

  7. ill, and must spend the next seven years talking about it;

  8. a victim of society’s low tolerance for deviant behavior;

  9. sane in an insane world;

  10. on a perilous journey from which he or she may never return.

  Fire

  One girl among us had set herself on fire. She used gasoline. She was too young to drive at the time. I wondered how she’d gotten hold of it. Had she walked to her neighborhood garage and told them her father’s car had run out of gas? I couldn’t look at her without thinking about it.

  I think the gasoline had settled in her collarbones, forming pools there beside her shoulders, because her neck and cheeks were scarred the most. The scars were thick ridges, alternating bright pink and white, in stripes up from her neck. They were so tough and wide that she couldn’t turn her head, but had to swivel her entire upper torso if she wanted to see a person standing next to her.

  Scar tissue has no character. It’s not like skin. It doesn’t show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It’s like a slipcover. It shields and disguises what’s beneath. That’s why we grow it; we have something to hide.

  Her name was Polly. This name must have seemed ridiculous to her in the days—or months—when she was planning to set herself on fire, but it suited her well in her slipcovered, survivor life. She was never unhappy. She was kind and comforting to those who were unhappy. She never complained. She always had time to listen to other people’s complaints. She was faultless, in her impermeable tight pink-and-white casing. Whatever had driven her, whispered “Die!” in her once-perfect, now-scarred ear, she had immolated it.

  Why did she do it? Nobody knew. Nobody dared to ask. Because—what courage! Who had the courage to burn herself? Twenty aspirin, a little slit alongside the veins of the arm, maybe even a bad half hour standing on a roof: We’ve all had those. And somewhat more dangerous things, like putting a gun in your mouth. But you put it there, you taste it, it’s cold and greasy, your finger is on the trigger, and you find that a whole world lies between this moment and the moment you’ve been planning, when you’ll pull the trigger. That world defeats you. You put the gun back in the drawer. You’ll have to find another way.

  What was that moment like for her? The moment she lit the match. Had she already tried roofs and guns and aspirin? Or was it just an inspiration?

  I had an inspiration once. I woke up one morning and I knew that today I had to swallow fifty aspirin. It was my task: my job for the day. I lined them up on my desk and took them one by one, counting. But it’s not the same as what she did. I could have stopped, at ten, or at thirty. And I could have done what I did do, which was go onto the street and faint. Fifty aspirin is a lot of aspirin, but going onto the street and fainting is like putting the gun back in the drawer.

  She lit the match.r />
  Where? In the garage at home, where she wouldn’t set anything else on fire? Out in a field? In the high school gym? In an empty swimming pool?

  Somebody found her, but not for a while.

  Who would kiss a person like that, a person with no skin?

  She was eighteen before this thought occurred to her She’d spent a year with us. Other people stormed and screamed and cringed and cried; Polly watched and smiled. She sat by people who were frightened, and her presence calmed them. Her smile wasn’t mean, it was understanding. Life was hellish, she knew that. But, her smile hinted, she’d burned all that out of her. Her smile was a little bit superior: We wouldn’t have the courage to burn it out of ourselves—but she understood that too. Everyone was different. People just did what they could.

  One morning somebody was crying, but mornings were often noisy: fights about getting up on time and complaints about nightmares. Polly was so quiet, so unobtrusive a presence, that we didn’t notice she wasn’t at breakfast. After breakfast, we could still hear crying.

  “Who’s crying?”

  Nobody knew.

  And at lunch, there was still crying.

  “It’s Polly,” said Lisa, who knew everything.

  “Why?”

  But even Lisa didn’t know why.

  At dusk the crying changed to screaming. Dusk is a dangerous time. At first she screamed, “Aaaaaah!” and “Eeeeeh!” Then she started to scream words.

  “My face! My face! My face!”

  We could hear other voices shushing her, murmuring comfort, but she continued to scream her two words long into the night.

  Lisa said, “Well, I’ve been expecting this for a while.”

  And then I think we all realized what fools we’d been.

  We might get out sometime, but she was locked up forever in that body.

  Freedom