Susanna Kaysen
Susanna Kaysen is an American author best known for her memoir Girl, Interrupted, based on her experiences at McLean Hospital. Born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she is the daughter of economist Carl Kaysen. Her other works include Asa, As I Knew Him, Far Afield, The Camera My Mother Gave Me, and Cambridge. Kaysen has also lived in the Faroe Islands and often draws on personal experiences in her writing.
1 Books Written
In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles--as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. "Girl, Interrupted" is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness, and recovery.