Girl, Interrupted. 30Years Later.

Girl, Interrupted interrogates how women are ‘mad’ when they refuse to conform – 30 years on, this memoir is still important

Girl, Interrupted is one of the most famous memoirs of hospitalisation and mental illness. More recent interpretations describe it as a narrative of “trauma”.

Kaysen did not anticipate the book’s reception at the time of its publication in 1993. It seemed to open readers up to tell their own stories, and they wrote to her from many places around the world to tell her about their hospitalisation. Looking back in a new edition published this year by Virago Books, she writes “it was surprising to me how many people had been in a mental hospital or had what used to be called a nervous breakdown”.

When it appeared, her book was widely reviewed as “funny”, “wry”, “piercing” and “frightening”. Set out as a series of short vignettes, the book allowed readers the space to “insert themselves” into this story of human suffering.

Read more of the Catharine Colborne article at The Conversation