Susanna Kaysen: Girl, Interrupted

Welcome back, dear inmate, I hope this new piece of interruption will not cause any permanent damage in your mind. The subject of this week's post is the book Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. The autobiographical novel gives a credible account about the author's experiences with her mental illness and about her staying in McLean Psychiatric Hospital.

The first thing worth taking a closer look at is the title itself. Not only is the title interrupted by a comma in the middle, but the whole narration is fragmanted, sometimes underpinned, other times contradicted by the official documents about the protagonist's health state. The title also refers to the 18-month interruption spent at a mental hospital at the beginning of Kaysen's adult life. Furthermore, she admits to have an obsession with tunnels, the tunnels of the asylum, and her notion about "the world [having] been reduced to a narrow, throbbing tunnel." Tunnels connect two separate places by interrupting both of them, and someone who goes into a tunnel is surrounded by darkness, having the illusion of going somewhere but without any idea about what's on the other side. The life of the patients is also interrupted by regular "checks" of the staff, in every 5-15-30 seconds, even at night. They even contemplate whether certain actions (like sex) could fit between two interruptions. The metaphor of interruption also appears in the arrangement of the room in the hospital. Whereas the room of the staff are on the right side, the patients live on the left, lunatic side of the building.

The protagonist is diagnosed with personality disorder, which she connects to her feminists viewpoints. According to the official documents, this illness is "most commonly diagnosed with women," and its symptoms, such as "compulsive promiscuity," instability of self-image, or binge eating are also associated with female behaviour. Kaysen supports her opinion by stating that these things wouldn't be considered problematic in case of a man.

The author describes her mental instability by a variety of pictures and methods. For example, like Charlotte in The Yellow Wallpaper, she also has a problem with patterns: "When I looked at these things, I saw other things within them." Likewise, her complicated relationship with her body also illustrates her troubled mind. She depicts her tongue as "a vast foreign object in [her] mouth," and she questions her own existence and animateness when she's scratching her wrist to make sure that her bones are there under her flesh, even though she can't see them. The intriguing thing about bones is, however, is that it's all that's left for the inmates of the mental institution, still it's the very same thing she can't find: "Our privacy, our liberty, our dignity: All of this was gone and we were stripped down to the bare bones of our selves." This proves that her lack of confidence concerns not only the reality of the outside world, but the reality of inner world as well.

The writer also successfully presents mental problems with a simile of physical illness. She writes that the intangible bundle of her thoughts is like the flue, because "the first thought triggers the whole circuit: [...] first a sore throat, then, inevitably, a stuffy nose and a cough." She underpins her reasons for self-mutilation, too, in relation to her precarious world view:  "I got a gruesome satisfaction from my sufferings. They proved my existence." 

Kaysen often laments the loss of time spent during interruptions. She knows that it's lost forever, still wants to know the amount of it, even in the case of such a trivial act like the pulling out of a teeth. It's crucial for her that in the darkness of doubts about herself and the whole world, at least time could be known to be real.

The book was adapted into a movie in 1999, starring Wynona Rider, Angelina Jolie, Whoopi Goldberg, and Brittany Murphy.