Rating: 
Summary: I really enjoyed this book
Review: I really enjoyed reading this book because it wasn't full of a lot of self pity. It is very well written, and tends to jump around in time. The book is about the author, Susanna, who is unexpectedly shipped to a mental institution for a "rest" and lands there for almost 2 years. For somebody suffering from a mood disorder, there is a lot they can relate to, and you really get into the characters.
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Summary: I'm a girl, interrupted too...
Review: Sanity is something most people cling to like a security blanket. They think the "insane" people of the world don't cling to it also, but in the memoir of Susanna Kaysen, you see that she does.All she wanted was to be a normal girl, but when normality abandoned her, she had to check herself into McLean hospital to figure out how to regain it. After spending a year and a half in the hospital, she left with no great advice to give on how to live her life or with a realization of what the meaning of life is. This doesn't mean that she learned nothing. Far from that. She learned more than almost anyone else did. She learned how to survive. Not how to live, but how to survive. No one can be taught in a hospital about how to live, because the whole essence of the hospital prevents the person from living their life. When the money ran out, she was kicked out of the hospital. This, sadly, is how the system works. Of course, she'd only expected to be in there for a couple of weeks. Weeks had turned into months and months into years, and by the time she was released, she thought she was a forever patient. She made friends with the other members of the ward, because all of them had been doomed to longer than expected stays. They were a tight group. A group of people who cared for one another, took care of one another, but also aggrivated each other in so many ways. I wanted to read this book for two reasons: 1.) I loved the movie it was based on. It's a bit different. Some of the scenes are the same, and if you've already seen the movie, you'll be picturing the characters doing certain things as you read about them in the book. 2.) Susanna was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, which is my diagnosis. I wanted to see how she (at the same age) handled the diagnosis. I see many similarities in the diagnosis, as well as differences. I also saw many differences/similarities in our psych hospital experiences. I love this book, and I think it is very well-written. I am glad that Susanna decided to share her story with everyone. Maybe a book like this will better help more people to understand mental illness.
Rating: 
Summary: Very insightful look into herself & her "caretakers"
Review: If you enjoyed the movie based on _Girl, Interrupted_, you will likely enjoy the book even more, as it goes much deeper inside Kaysen's thoughts and feelings, and spends more time on each character in general. Kaysen does a fantastic job of describing how she felt during her stay at McLean Hospital; her prose is highly-descriptive, with an almost poetic feel to some of the passages. For some reason, one bit replays itself in my head, even when I haven't read this book for some time: "Oh Valerie," I said, "you promised --" Then the Thorazine hit me. It was like a wall of water, strong but soft...My legs and feet felt like mattresses, they were so huge and dense. Valerie and Georgina felt like mattresses too, big soft mattresses pressing on either side of me. It was comforting." As she explores the depths of her psyche, she often uses dark humor, which is a very effective tool. The tactics she and other patients used to manipulate the hospital staff are often brilliant, sometimes poignantly sad. Kaysen's unflinching description of the sociopathic Lisa feels dead-on; the reader simultaneously loves and hates her, and agonizes with Kaysen as her worship of Lisa leads to disappointment again and again. I've read this book several times, and will read it again in the future - it's an often dark, often inspiring look at the mental hospitals of the sixties, and at the nature of the human mind. Kaysen spares us no detail when describing her own disorder and behavior, or the disorders and behaviors of others. A very frank book, and an excellent read.
Rating:
Summary: Well Done
Review: Disturbing, but sensitive and thoughtful. Is it really just a judgement call between "normal" and "insane?"
Rating:
Summary: Girl, Interrupted
Review: I read this book as soon as i seen the movie. I was so much in love with the movie i wanted to read the book so it could go into more detail. Thats exactly what the book did too. If you loved the movie as much as i did then you will love the book more. You learn more about a character and see what happens to susanna after she has been released. Everytime after I write a review i always want to do that Do Do Dooooo like in reading rainbow. Anyways the book is so awesome!
Rating:
Summary: Girl Amazed,
Review: In 1967 18-year-old Susana Kaysen was sent to Mc Lean mental institution, after spending no more then an hour in a doctors office. At admission she was diagnosed with a psychoneurotic depressive reaction, and personality pattern disturbance.
She was a high school graduate, that for threw past year had been living with her boyfriend, but that was finished when she got into the hospital.
In the hospital she made new friends, and saw and learned many different things. During her year in the mental institute she wrote a journal, which is actually the book. In her journal she tells what happens in the hospital, how they treat the patients, what they give to them, and what they do to them. She describes a lot about the way the hospital looks and where the usually like to "hang out." There are many different people she talks about in the book, some being the doctors and nurses in the hospital, and some of them being the girls in the hospital. She tells what they do, how they behave, what the look likes, and how she feels towards them. Lisa is always speaking her mind and listens to no one. Georgina, her room maid, is like her best friend.
The story is a true story and the author is the one writing about what she had gone through in life.
The book has a non-chronological order that makes it so great to read. Sometimes she has flash backs about high school, and how she used to behave before going into the hospital.
Many times I felt like I was right there with her because she described every thing with so much heart.
I think Girl, Interrupted is an amazing book and every teenage girl should read it!
Rating: 
Summary: The Author is in Denial
Review: Susanna Kaysen challenges the mental health care system but doesn't really give much insight on what it is to be insane. This is not Life-Size, by Jennifer Shute, about a woman with anorexia who almost starves herself to death. Shute examines the issues wrapped up in compulsive self-starvation -- sexuality, the fear of intimacy, the terror of the loss of control that outweighs the need for relationships or even life itself -- even when they're embarrassing. On the other hand, Susanna Kaysen's account is so full of minimization and denial that it illuminates nothing. The minimization and denial are not for effect, either, in the way that, in Rousseau's Confessions, Rousseau recounts a scene from his childhood where he is unjustly accused of breaking or stealing a comb; he writes the scene so that you doubt him too. The passage creates a relationship between writer and reader that mirrors the relationship between his accuser and himself, and highlights a certain masochistic pathology of his character that you see throughout the Confessions. Susanna Kaysen's minimizations don't shed light. For example, one of the issues that contributed to her diagnosis of borderline personality disorder was "promiscuity." She suggestst that, if she had been a man, she would not have been diagnosed or confined in a mental hospital because the definition of "promiscuity" is different for a man than for a woman. Of course, by arguing about numbers she ignores the real point: the compulsiveness or self-destructiveness of her sexual behavior is what is relevant, not the number of partners; just as spending a lot of money going shopping might be considered a symptom of mental illness if the spending is without regard to income or items purchased, or has a compulsive quality, but it may be a hobby if the spender has plenty of money for the things she buys and purchases appropriately (an inappropriate purchase might be fifteen gallons of milk by a single woman -- how could she use it all? -- just because it's on sale.) Ms. Kaysen includes sections of her medical records for effect, but interestingly, admitting information -- that is, why she had herself committed -- was blacked out by the author. It's a shame that she spent so much time in a mental hospital without gaining insight into her condition, and it's a shame for the reader that she illuminates very little about mental illness.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't let the film version fool you.
Review: Kaysen's autobiography is an irreverent but mostly harrowing account of her institutionalization at eighteen. She brings her fellow inmates to life in a way that I clearly remember almost a year after reading the book, and patches together the memory of the day she was institutionalized to demonstrate that it took no more than fifteen minutes for a doctor to sign her off to the institution without so much as a probing question or even a close look at her condition. Considering that this occurred in 1967, it would seem that the major reason for Kaysen's incarceration was merely that she was an unapologetic, sexually active, single woman. But you'll have to read it and decide for yourself. I still shudder at the memory of the scene where Kaysen dines on her own hand out of separation anxiety.
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Summary: Rachel's Review
Review: Girl, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen, is a story of true intensity. After a session with a phychiatrist, 16 year old Susanna Kaysen is diagonosed with Borderline Personality disorder, and is immeadiantly sent to MCclean Hospital.Susanna is to spend the next two years in the MCclean Mental Instution for teenage girls. While living in the Instution, Susanna goes through many horrific experiences, and meets the kind of people that you could only imagine in your nightmares. Susanna eventually makes friends with a tempermental patient who has a reputation of being the "boss" of their ward.But in time, Susanna realizes that a friend in a mental instution is very different from a friend in conatct with the outside world.
Explore the world that Susanna beholds. Inspect the very defination of sanity, and view the world from the eyes of a remarkable teenage girl with vivid concepts of every day issues that face our lives.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful (Borderline) life
Review: It is difficult to imagine that somebody with this condition could dig as deep into herself as Susanna Kaysen has done. This is a multilayered book. I read it again after reading The Courtship Dance of the Borerline (by Walker) (AKA Boy, interrupted??) to try and get a sense of the chaos. Girl is certainly a book to read more than once, and to read in different moods (relaxed, hyper, exhausted etc) Doing so sheds different lights on the story. Like the Courtship Dance, another excellent memoir is the movie Gia (for Jolie fans)
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