{"id":126950,"date":"2018-06-27T09:00:39","date_gmt":"2018-06-27T13:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=126950"},"modified":"2018-06-27T12:14:12","modified_gmt":"2018-06-27T16:14:12","slug":"girl-interrupted-twenty-five-years-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/27\/girl-interrupted-twenty-five-years-later\/","title":{"rendered":"Girl, Interrupted<\/i>, Twenty-Five Years Later"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Susanna Kaysen. Photo by Michael Lionstar.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

When Susanna Kaysen set out to write a memoir of her time spent at the psychiatric hospital McLean, she wanted to write like \u201can anthropologist in the loony bin.\u201d She had watched her husband, an anthropologist, conduct a study of Faroe Islands\u2014\u201ca standard anthropological thing, a study of a village, of who married and who didn\u2019t and what were the feuds,\u201d Kaysen told me. Her husband\u2019s study made her realize that \u201cMcLean was sort of like a village but somewhat larger. Our ward was a tiny little village with our doctors and nurses and aides.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kaysen hired a lawyer and got ahold of her medical records and began writing. She pared down details about herself and her struggle with mental illness so that the resulting memoir, Girl, Interrupted<\/em>,\u00a0reads today like a comedic travelogue of an extended stay at a young women\u2019s ward. Lines like this one, about restrictions on sharp flatware, are typical: \u201cWe ate with plastic. It was a perpetual picnic, our hospital.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet the readers of twenty-five years ago\u2014Girl, Interrupted <\/em>was published in June 1993\u2014were not quite ready to recognize the book\u2019s detached perspective. Instead, Kaysen said, many took Girl, Interrupted <\/em>as some sort of stigma-defying big-t<\/em> Truth about life with mental illness. During the book tour, readers would line up to tell Kaysen how her book had spoken to them. The author recalls hearing things like \u201cnobody else has ever said these things\u201d and \u201cI feel like I\u2019m not alone.\u201d Or: \u201cYou wrote this book for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI would say to myself, I didn\u2019t. I don\u2019t know you. I wasn\u2019t try to reach you,\u201d Kaysen said. \u201cWhat had spurred me to write was rage and a desire to dissect this world. And that didn\u2019t seem to register for a lot of these people.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Kaysen had published two well-regarded novels, but she was unprepared for the success that would follow Girl,<\/em> Interrupted.\u00a0<\/em>At readings, young women would come up to her and display evidence of self-harm. Letters poured in. Young women \u201cwould find my phone number somehow and ask to meet me,\u201d Kaysen recalled. \u201cThey would say they felt that I was <\/em>them, or something like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is one of the reasons for memoir\u2019s success as a genre: readers felt an intense and personal identification with the book\u2019s narrator, and because the book was labeled as true, they assumed that connection extended to the author as well. \u201cThere was very little sense that this book was an artifact,\u201d Kaysen said. Kaysen\u2019s memoir, with its nonlinear chronology and scans of her actual medical records, felt very postmodern. \u201cPeople thought it was a transcription of reality or my brain,\u201d Kaysen told me. \u201cThat\u2019s an intrusive feeling to the person into whose brain you didn\u2019t plug.\u201d<\/p>\n

Girl, Interrupted <\/em>was an early entry in the publishing gold rush that would be termed the memoir boom. Autobiography had long held a place in American letters, but typically those books were told by the famous or powerful. However, in the wake of the personal-is-political progressive movements of the sixties, the life writing of unknown citizens became more marketable. Early examples from this genre, termed \u201cmemoir\u201d to distinguish it from the high roller\u2019s \u201cautobiography,\u201d include Vivian Gornick\u2019s Fierce Attachments <\/em>(1987), William Styron\u2019s Darkness Visible <\/em>(1990), and AIDS<\/small> memoirs such as Paul Monette\u2019s Borrowed Time <\/em>(1988).<\/p>\n

The few years after 1993 would see the books that marked the memoir boom\u2019s apex: Mary Karr\u2019s The Liars<\/em>\u2019 Club <\/em>(1995), Frank McCourt\u2019s Angela\u2019s Ashes <\/em>(1996), and Kathryn Harrison\u2019s The Kiss <\/em>(1997). But Kaysen\u2019s book is still considered the progenitor of the now common mental-illness memoir. While Styron\u2019s memoir on depression and Kate Millett\u2019s The Loony-Bin Trip<\/em>\u00a0(1990)\u00a0<\/em>predate Girl,<\/em> Interrupted<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>neither garnered such widespread popularity. \u201cI do think that Girl, Interrupted <\/em>was right at the forefront of the memoir wave,\u201d said Julie Grau, who acquired Kaysen\u2019s book as a young editor and now heads a Penguin Random House imprint that focuses on memoir. \u201cSusanna\u2019s memoir spawned many Girl, Interrupted<\/em>\u2013type memoirs of young women grappling with mental illness in various forms. We can all come up with lists of the nieces and nephews of Girl, Interrupted<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0The following year would see the publication of two other successful memoirs by literary women, Lucy Grealy\u2019s Autobiography of a Face <\/em>and Elizabeth Wurtzel\u2019s Prozac Nation.<\/em><\/p>\n

Grau was working at the imprint Turtle Bay, an all-female \u201cUtopian little imprint\u201d housed in a brownstone, when Kaysen\u2019s manuscript arrived on her desk. It wasn\u2019t an obvious best seller. The manuscript was rejected by a number of publishers before Grau accepted it. \u201cI presented it to Joni Evans\u201d\u2014the imprint\u2019s director\u2014\u201cand said I wanted to buy it,\u201d Grau, who also founded the imprint Riverhead, remembered. \u201cWe actually laugh about this now, but Joni said, \u2018Oh, God, who would want to read a book about a girl in a mental institution?\u2019 And I said, \u2018Actually, I think a lot of people.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

The book was a New York Times\u00a0<\/em>best seller for eleven weeks in hardcover and twenty-three weeks in paperback. Today there are 1.5 million copies in print in the United States. Prior to publication, though, Kaysen herself doubted that her book would make anything but a quiet debut. When advance copies were being distributed to critics, the author went to Italy, expecting little attention. \u201cI started to get these completely crazy phone calls,\u201d Kaysen told me. \u201cAllure<\/em> wants you to write about how you dress. Vogue<\/em> wants to interview you. Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/em> wants to run an excerpt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laura Zigman, the former publishing publicity exec who worked on Girl, Interrupted<\/em>,\u00a0believes that Girl<\/em>\u2019s prominence was helped along by the fact that it was came amid a larger debate around mental health in America. Dr. Peter Kramer\u2019s acclaimed Listening to Prozac\u00a0<\/em>also came out in 1993. Political headwinds were also in the book\u2019s favor: the Clinton administration enacted antidiscrimination laws for those with mental illness, and the president\u2019s health-care reform bill, introduced in the fall of 1993, called for improved public mental-health services. \u201cSusanna\u2019s book opened up a conversation on mental health,\u201d Zigman said. \u201cIt was so visceral and poetic. Darkness Visible <\/em>was published before, but I think Susanna\u2019s book was such a success because it had a female voice and a younger voice and it was a lyrical book about that experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The dissonance between what the author calls \u201cthe intentions of the desk\u201d and the public\u2019s reception made our conversation difficult at first. Kaysen feels that her story, helped along by the Winona Ryder\u2013starring movie adaptation, has taken on a life of its own. \u201cI just feel like I didn\u2019t even write this book,\u201d Kaysen told me early on in our phone call. \u201cI guess whatever that book is, it just has nothing to do with me anymore, if it ever did.\u201d She hesitated. \u201cIt has become something else, and it doesn\u2019t belong to me. I shouldn\u2019t have any commentary on it anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fearing she was about to hang up, I made my voice gentle and asked her what she\u2019d intended the book to be. She told me about her anthropological moxie and the time she spent living on the Faroe Islands. She told me she felt her book was a failure and that she probably should\u2019ve written a \u201cbetter\u201d one. She told me that the last thing she was trying to do was write about her own life.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy book has two virtues,\u201d Kaysen said. \u201cIt\u2019s short, which is very important because people don\u2019t have long attention spans, and it\u2019s easy to read. It\u2019s like a primer. There are no complicated words, no complicated sentences. I don\u2019t think that it is totally straightforward, but it reads as if it is. And then there is this blankness and omission, a lot of omission. I don\u2019t write about my family really. I don\u2019t write that much about my internal state. It\u2019s not about me.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet Kaysen was willing to yield. She spoke in broad strokes about having \u201ca kind of lonely childhood\u201d and how books functioned as companions. \u201cThere are other books that have filled a role culturally, in some small way\u2014like The<\/em> Sorrows of Young Werther<\/em>.\u00a0And how many people thought they were Holden Caulfield? But I wasn\u2019t thinking, I\u2019m going to make a lot of people feel like I understand them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel lucky in a way,\u201d she conceded. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t happen to that many people that you write something and lots and lots and lots of people find it extremely important and meaningful to them. People were loving a book I didn\u2019t write, but maybe that doesn\u2019t matter because they were able to see it the way they needed to see it. That\u2019s a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kaysen was riffing now, her earlier hesitation evaporated. \u201cIt remains to me a mystery why people like my book, and it\u2019s not with false modesty I say that. It\u2019s mysterious why anyone loves any book. As an author, there\u2019s nothing you can do but watch.\u201d She laughed, fully, for perhaps the first time in our nearly hour-long call. And then, after exchanging pleasantries, she hung up.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Tara<\/span>\u00a0Wanda Merrigan is a freelance writer living in Philadelphia.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  When Susanna Kaysen set out to write a memoir of her time spent at the psychiatric hospital McLean, she wanted to write like \u201can anthropologist in the loony bin.\u201d She had watched her husband, an anthropologist, conduct a study of Faroe Islands\u2014\u201ca standard anthropological thing, a study of a village, of who married and 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