A review by octavia_cade
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen

reflective medium-paced

3.0

This is a memoir of the two years that Kaysen spent in a psychiatric hospital in the 1960s. I enjoyed it - the beginning, in particular, was excellent - but as the book went on I found that the short chapters went one of two ways. They were either relatively straightforward recollections of life at the hospital, including the other patients, or they were Kaysen's more reflective observations on the nature of her illness. I have to admit that I found it much more difficult to connect with the latter. It seemed a bit woolly compared to, for example, Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, which I read last year and thought excellent - Jamison took a heavily science-based approach, which I found particularly appealing.

I'm not sure what it says about me as a reader, and as a person, that I found the character sketches of the other patients - often shocking, often tragic - much more compelling than the reflective sections of the text, but I suspect what it says is nothing good. It does feel a little like getting... not entertainment, exactly, but interest, from other people's miseries.