Girl, Interrupted

Biographies & Memoirs

Kaysen, Susanna

Community & Culture

Turtle Bay Books

“It was probably because I was so often taken away from Cambridge when I was young that I loved it as much as I did . . .” London, Florence, Athens: Susanna, a precocious young girl growing up in 1950s Cambridge, would rather be home than in any of these places. Uprooted from the streets around Harvard Square, she feels lost and excluded in all the far-flung cities to which her father’s career takes the family. She always comes home with relief—but soon enough wonders if outsiderness may be her permanent condition. Written with a sharp eye for the pretensions—and charms—of the intellectual classes, Cambridge captures the mores of an era now past, the ordinary lives of extraordinary people in a singular part of America, and the ways we can—and cannot—go home.

Cambridge (Vintage Contemporaries)

Literature & Fiction

United States

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

“It was probably because I was so often taken away from Cambridge when I was young that I loved it as much as I did . . .” So begins this novel-from-life by the best-selling author of Girl, Interrupted, an exploration of memory and nostalgia set in the 1950s among the academics and artists of Cambridge, Massachusetts. London, Florence, Athens: Susanna, the precocious narrator of Cambridge, would rather be home than in any of these places. Uprooted from the streets around Harvard Square, she feels lost and excluded in all the locations to which her father’s career takes the family. She comes home with relief—but soon enough wonders if outsiderness may be her permanent condition. Written with a sharp eye for the pretensions—and charms—of the intellectual classes, Cambridge captures the mores of an era now past, the ordinary lives of extraordinary people in a singular part of America, and the delights, fears, and longings of childhood.

Cambridge

Literary

KNOPF

This book is a replica of the original from the collections of The New York Public Library; it was produced from digital images created by The New York Public Library and its partners as part of their preservation efforts.  To enhance your reading pleasure, the aging and scanning artifacts have been removed using patented page cleaning technology.  We hope you enjoy the result.

ASA, AS I KNEW HIM

Contemporary

Vintage

Jonathan Brand, a graduate student in anthropology, has decided to do his fieldwork in the remote Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic.  But, despite his Harvard training, he can barely understand, let alone "study," the culture he encounters.  From his struggles with the local cuisine to his affair with the Danish woman the locals want him to marry, Jonathan is both repelled by and drawn into the Faroese way of life. Wry and insightful, Far Afield reveals reveals Susanna Kaysen's gifts of imagination, satire, and compassion.

FAR AFIELD (A Vintage contemporaries original)

Random House Value Publishing

Set in the changing world of the 1960s, the motion picture Girl Interrupted is the searing story of Susanna, a young woman who finds herself at a mental institution for troubled young women. Susanna's 'short rest', prescribed by a psychiatrist she had met just once, becomes a strange journey into Alice's Wonderland, as she spends nearly a year both struggling and flirting with the thin line between 'normal' and 'crazy'. Susanna soon realizes how hard it is to get out once she's been committed, and ultimately she has to choose between the world of those who belong on the inside - such as the seductive and dangerous Lisa - and those who can engage with the reality of the outside world. This volume includes storyboards and a discussion by the film's director James Mangold about the film-making process by which this screenplay by James Mangold and Lisa Loomer and Anna Hamilton Phelan was transferred to the screen.

Humor & Entertainment

Loomer, Lisa

Mangold, James

Phelan, Anna Hamilton

Movies

Faber&Faber

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. The author offers a compelling memoir of her two years as a teenager in a psychiatric hospital, sharing vivid portraits of her fellow patients, their keepers, and her experiences during treatment.

Girl, Interrupted (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Turtleback Books

Girl Interrupted

Arts & Literature

Random House, Inc.

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was sent to McLean Hospital, where she spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, Ray Charles--and for its progressive 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 gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

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