Welcome to day six of the Banned Book Week hop hosted by the lovely ladies at I Read Banned Books and I'm A Reader, Not A Writer. To find more blogs participating click on the names of the blogs.

Today we're going more of the way of biography, with Suzanna Kaysen's wonderful memoir, Girl, Interrupted.



  

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele —Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray
Charles as for its progressiv
e methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.

Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching documnet that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.