Girl, Interrupted

1. My overall impressions of Kaysen’s memoir: utterly impressed, amazed, jealous. The main reason for my desire to snatch the creative genes right from her DNA is that she manages to appeal to me on both an emotional and intellectual level. In my opinion, inciting a range of reactions that includes laughing, cringing, feeling remorse, and wanting to take a psychology course in order to debate the fine line separating normalcy and craziness is all I could ever possibly want to give to my own readers.

2. For me, the real subject is fine lines. We (as a culture? a society? as modern-day homo sapiens?) have become obsessed with creating categories and definitions, and some of us literally go crazy trying to figure out in what “box” we belong or how we should identify ourselves. With too many squares made and no one square that absolutely defines a person, we’re left to wonder: how many fine lines do I have to cross before I’m considered crazy?

3. The craft feature that stands out the most to me is Kaysen’s reflection. Though she does directly and intimately reflect upon herself, as in “the longer I didn’t say anything about it, the farther away it got, until the me who had been in the hospital was a tiny blur” (125), often her reflections target small, impersonal details. The paragraphs she dedicates to things like pimples, hospital tunnels, and the “checks” rounds the nurses make in the hospital do not directly talk about her mental illness, however, they speak volumes about her personality. The seemingly random specifics offer insights into the difficult and complex things that she wants to articulate about her experience.

For example, her reaction to the black and white checkered floor in the ice cream parlor was the best visual aid for me in understanding how her mind works and what might possibly warrant it as “abnormal” (for lack of a better word): “The contrast got under my skin. I always felt itchy in the ice cream parlor. The floor meant Yes, No, This, That, Up, Down, Day, Night—all the indecisions and opposites that were bad enough in life without having them spelled out for you on the floor” (52). This passage echoes what she reflects on in an earlier chapter concerning her difficulties with patterns: “Oriental rugs, tile floors, printed curtains, things like that….When I looked at these things, I saw other things within them….[A]ll patterns seemed to contain potential representations, which in a dizzying array would flicker briefly to life….Reality was getting too dense” (41). Though Kaysen includes a few “visual aids” in this latter passage, for me it is still a rather abstract and complex concept to grasp. However, it is the placement of the two reflections that makes them effective: first I read about her mental condition; then I go with her to the ice cream parlor. Aware of her uneasiness around patterns, I see and even feel more acutely her confusion and “itchiness” in the floor tiles.

These focused details reveal Kaysen’s personality both as a young woman in a mental institution and a writer. A psychologist might see her reflections about other people and things as a way of shielding herself from her audience, but I think her shields are disguises themselves: they are metaphors that Kaysen the writer uses to symbolize herself and/or to reveal something about herself. (To a trained eye, a metaphor will “shield” its true intention about as well as a window screen prevents the sunlight from entering a room.) Her passage about scar tissue both demonstrates and embodies this cover-up that’s meant to reveal: “Scar tissue has no character. It’s not like skin. It doesn’t show age or illness or pallor or tan. It has no pores, no hair, no wrinkles. It’s like a slipcover. It shields and disguises what’s beneath. That’s why we grow it; we have something to hide” (16). The subtle pronoun switch from “it” to “we” is the clue in this case that she’s really talking about something more personal than scar tissue. Her “we” could be all of us, readers and Kaysen, or it could be Kaysen and the other women on her ward. In either case, she is a part of that “we,” and in that way she sets up that she has something to hide, which she will slowly reveal as the book continues.

4. Kaysen’s book helps me realize how I might use poetry in writing memoir. What I like most about her style of reflection is her poetic sensibility to it, carefully selecting and narrowing in on details that she will use to speak to larger issues and themes. She draws us close up to her hand, to Polly’s face, to the floor of a restaurant, and suddenly that one detail becomes the whole story for a moment, just as in a poem. (Think about how, in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room,” the National Geographic magazine takes us out of the waiting room and into the exotic places that the speaker describes; this then takes the speaker out of her own body momentarily. One detail both becomes and changes the course of the poem.)

The use of a comma in Kaysen’s title, despite that the painting title she takes hers from does not have it, is another skillful poetic decision. The word “interrupted” indicates a jolt or shift; inserting a comma in the title, then, creates a visual (and aural) interruption between the two words. In this way, Kaysen demonstrates how a true poet can use punctuation to its full capabilities.

Certainly, Kaysen’s somewhat fragmented and short chapters at times give the impression of reading a book of poems. Not only are details such as these and a structure such as this particularly engaging for me, a poet, but they are also gratifying. I am wholly grateful to Kaysen for designing her book in this way: her form gives me permission to experiment with my own. I don’t have to create one long essay, or a series of long chapters. What if I attempted to write a memoir of poems, or a memoir containing poems? I am inspired to think up all sorts of possibilities.

For now, as I attempt to see my life in story-form and write it in paragraph-form, Kaysen’s book serves as a great example in how I might successfully unite my jumble of thoughts, emotions, and memories into small, manageable, even if fragmented, doses.