Girl, Interrupted [first edition]

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.