'Girl, Interrupted'
by Susanna Kaysen
Random House, $16.50
In 1967, fiction writer Susanna Kaysen, then 18, was diagnosed as having a "borderline personality disorder" after little more than 20 minutes with a doctor she had never seen before. She was summarily bundled into a taxi to the McLean Hospital outside Boston where she spent two years inside a special ward for teenage girls. There, she watched the late 1960s unfold and contemplated whether she was "crazy or right? In 1967, this was a hard question to answer."
Now, 25 years after the fact, Kaysen tells her story in a haunting memoir of her stay at McLean. The startling clarity of her writing sharply illuminates her ward and "the shimmering, ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed." As she notes, it's easy to dismiss mentally troubled patients as different when they act differently. But someone "who acts `normal' raises the uncomfortable question, What's the difference between that person and me?" It's a question that applies equally to convicts or the homeless or the poor. It's somehow more comforting if they are "different" and the boundary is clear. But what if they aren't, and it isn't?
