“It’s Almost Like It Isn’t About Me”: Susanna Kaysen on Writing Girl, Interrupted, 30 Years Later

“Time is very weird,” says Susanna Kaysen, best known for her first memoir, Girl, Interrupted. “It just seems impossible that it’s 30 years ago that it came out. Of course, at the same time, it seems a long time ago. It’s both.”

The memoir, published in 1993, catalogs Kaysen’s 18-month stay at a Belmont, Massachusetts psychiatric facility colloquially known as McLean’s; Sylvia Plath had been a patient, as had James Taylor, Ray Charles, and Robert Lowell. She was admitted in 1967, at age 18, following a one-off visit to a psychiatrist prompted by an episode where she ingested 50 aspirin. A nurse’s admission report, one of several logs Kaysen includes in the memoir, describes her as a “very depressed, desperate young lady…cries easily…very cooperative.” 

The idea for the memoir was sparked by Kaysen’s working on a novel about an anthropologist: “It came to me,” she writes in the introduction to a new anniversary edition out from Vintage Books, “that I had lived in another small, self-contained place and had observed its alignments and hierarchies, its customs and special language. I intended this memoir to be my own village study.” There are episodic descriptions of the patients she lived alongside. A young woman who arrived each year around Thanksgiving and left after Christmas, who consumed whole roasted chickens brought weekly by her father, the carcasses of which she hoarded in her room. There is a young woman covered in severe, self-inflicted burns, and one described by another patient as a “suburban junkie.” Kaysen describes the institution’s lack of privacy, the 15 and 10 and five-minute checks performed by the nurses. “It was our metronome, our pulse,” she writes. “It was our lives measured out in…dented tin spoons brimming with what should have been sweet but was sour, gone off, gone by without savoring it: our lives.” As much as it is a study of this very specific time and place, it is an engagement with the slipperiness of perception.

In 1999 the film adaptation debuted, ushering in a fresh wave of fans. It had been a passion project of Winona Ryder, whose bookdealer father gave her an early copy of the memoir soon after her voluntary stay at an in-patient facility following her breakup from Johnny Depp. She played the character of Susanna Kaysen and Angelina Jolie played opposite as Lisa, a fictionalized version of a woman Kaysen knew at McLean’s, for which she won the Oscar for best supporting actress.

In 1987, Kaysen had published her debut novel, Asa, as I Knew Him, told from the perspective of a young woman imagining the adolescent life of a former lover. It’s a languid book—an intra-office affair at a literary magazine; privileged boys lolling in Cambridge backyard pools—filled with perfect lines: “He had three dollars and she looked like a five-dollar lunch.” Three years later she published Far Afield, the one about an anthropologist working in the Faroe Islands. In another three, Girl, Interrupted. The next books, The Camera My Mother Gave Me, a memoir about the medical saga she embarked upon after developing an acute vaginal pain, and Cambridge, which would now be called autofiction but in 2014 was described as a “novel-from-life,” took eight and 13 years. 

In all, Kaysen is a superb and sly observer of the minute strangenesses of being human, the interconnected fragility and resilience of the body and mind, and the day-to-day absurd. (While we chat, she brings up the July 1993 issue of Vanity Fair, which featured an item on Girl, Interrupted. “I think my head is wrapped in a curtain,” she says, wryly, of the accompanying portrait, and indeed it is.) Her in-the-works writing project about the “absolutely ridiculous details” of the pandemic—“every single motion of having somebody over for dinner on the porch, everything you had to wash and sterilize and touch, not touch, how exciting it was to go to a store finally and buy a light bulb”—was derailed by what she describes as “this cancer business.” Of her recovery from a recent lung surgery, “Everybody tells me it’s great,” she says. “I don’t agree. But they know. I’m just experiencing it.”