Borderline Girlhoods: Mental Illness, Adolescence, and Femininity in Girl, Interrupted

Abstract

What about me was so deranged that in less than half an hour a doctor would pack me off to the nuthouse? He tricked me though: a couple of weeks. It was closer to two years. I was eighteen. (Kaysen 39) After a twenty-minute interview with a psychiatrist, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was compelled to sign herself into McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institute, where she would spend nearly two years. Kaysen’s memoir of the experience, Girl, Interrupted (1994) remained on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for at least seven years after its initial publication. According to Publisher’s Weekly, customer demand for Kaysen’s memoir quickly surpassed the original printing of 13,500, which resulted in Girl, Interrupted being “temporarily out of stock” (Maryles 18). As recently as 2000, a reporter for the Boston Globe suggested that Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted threatened to replace Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar as the “Must-read for young women in high school and college” (Bass 7). Like The Bell Jar (1963), Girl, Interrupted exists as a cross-written text that straddles the arbitrary border between young adult and adult literature. “Many teenagers read the book long before they encounter it in class, just as a previous generation of young women were drawn to The Bell Jar” (Bass 7). The popularity of Girl, Interrupted and the association of the text with U.S. adolescent girls warrants further consideration of the memoir as a text read by young adults and as a representation of adolescent girlhood that offers a complex commentary on feminine coming-of-age. In this essay, I analyze Kaysen’s memoir as a unique narrative mode through which she intervenes in knowledge about feminine adolescence. Specifically, I trace how Kaysen relies on the figure of the wounded girl