"Girl, Interrupted"
By: Susanna Kaysen
Overview:
In Susanna Kaysen's brilliant memoir about her internal struggles with depression, suicide attempts, borderline personality disorder,and her stay at the notorious McLean psychiatric hospital. As part of our banned book project, I wanted to experience the raw material I had only seen in Sylvia plaths work beforehand. Susanna embarks on a journey of self doubt and emotional numbness which she faces as she connects with the other patients and nurses around her. Reading this as a high school student, I felt a personal connection to her character as well as the actions that stemmed from her emotions. I became invested in her work and researched the symptoms of a borderline personality disorder to discover that some of the traits go hand in hand with teenage behavior. Through her incredibly uncensored work the readers got to see Polly and her tragic pyromaniac behavior, find a little of Lisa's badass persona in ourselves, and start to question our own teenage identity and began to see the big picture of who people are, who they can be, and the secret ugliness we all possess in one way or another. |