logo

88 pages 2 hours read

Susanna Kaysen

Girl, Interrupted

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1993

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Introduction

Girl, Interrupted

  • Genre: Memoir
  • Originally Published: 1993
  • Reading Level/Interest: Lexile level: 760L; grades 9-12; adult  
  • Structure/Length: 34 chapters; approx. 192 pages; approx. 3 hours on audio
  • Central Concern: The author recounts her experiences as a teen in the 1960s while she was a psychiatric patient at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. In this context, she examines society’s ambivalent definitions of mental health and illness, and the subjective nature of personality, behavior, and disorder.
  • Potential Sensitivity Issues: Mental health concerns; self-harm; institutionalization; suicide

Susanna Kaysen, Author

  • Bio: Born in 1948 in Cambridge, Massachusetts; after graduating from The Cambridge School at Weston, admitted herself to McLean Hospital at 18 upon her doctor’s urging; authored two well-received novels prior to this nonfiction work, her most popular
  • Other Works: Asa, As I Knew Him (1987); Far Afield (1990); The Camera My Mother Gave Me (2001); Cambridge (2014)

CENTRAL THEMES connected and noted throughout this Teaching Unit:

  • Perceptions of Mental Health
  • Personality and Self-Image
  • Gender and Sexism

STUDY OBJECTIVES: In accomplishing the components of this Unit, students will:

  • Develop an understanding of the subjective nature of mental health diagnoses through close engagement with the author’s questioning of her own diagnosis as depicted throughout the memoir.
  • Gain insight into the ways in which Perceptions of Mental Health and treatment in the US have changed over time through a comparison of the experiences described by the author with current treatment approaches.
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text