About a month ago I decided to start an in-home and online joint book club, My first monthly Ghetto Girl Book Club will be held tonight – Tuesday November 10, 2009 from 7-9 pm. If you can’t join us at my house, then at least join me online. You’ll be missing out on my famous ranch, cheese and [...]
About a month ago I decided to start an in-home and online joint book club, My first monthly Ghetto Girl Book Club will be held tonight – Tuesday November 10, 2009 from 7-9 pm. If you can’t join us at my house, then at least join me online. You’ll be missing out on my famous ranch, cheese and bacon dip, but at least you can live vicariously through the photos I’ll post later, as I will be updating this blog post live throughout the day and evening up until tomorrow.
Our book this month is Girl, Interrupted and it was written by Susanna Kaysen. I’m so excited about this choice, as I saw the movie back in 1999 and watched Angelina Jolie steal the film away from Winona Ryder, which is exactly why Angelina deserved that Oscar. I enjoyed the movie, because mental illness is fascinating to me and there was plenty of it in the film. Ever since then I’ve been planning on reading the book, and now that I finally have I can safely say the book was completely different than the film, especially since the film had a different and much darker ending.
Girl, Interrupted was written by Susanna Kaysen and it is about her two-year stay in a mental hospital as a teenager back in the 1960’s. She would be eventually diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, a mental illness I still have trouble understanding completely. Even while I was reading the book I kept saying to myself, but what does she have wrong with her exactly? I laughed when I turned the page and read the section on the definition of this disease, as I still didn’t understand BPD fully. I think this is due in part because both the book and the film never shared enough of the ”dark and twisty” moments Susanna had. I have trouble visualizing this conditions, as I’ve seen first hand most other mental illnesses. After watching the movie I thought Susanna was committed mainly because she was slutty, and after reading the book I thought it was because of her suicide attempt, she was slutty, and having a hard time with a new shrink who didn’t know her. After reading the part when Susanna was trying to chew into her hand to see if she could find bones I thought it wasn’t that big a deal. Then again, I grew up in a house where my brother chewed the noses off of our cats because he wanted to see if they were plastic, as well as having a neighbor who was a cutter and was all scratched up all the time, especially her arms, and they frightened me.
If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, still visit us and even weigh in on the discussion. You never know what is going to pop up in the comments or on this post later.
- For instance, did you ever notice how the early movie posters showed Winona Ryder, but once the film came out all of a sudden Angelina Jolie was thrown on the cover art?
My favorite quote from the film:
Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the 60’s. Or maybe I was just a girl… interrupted.
- My first thought when I shut the book was why would the producers of the film take away the whole meaning behind the title? As much as I liked that quote in the film, I found the inspiration behind the title fascinating, as I love art and Vermeer. Susanna had seen Vermeer’s Girl Interrupted at Her Music with her high school teacher. I had planned on going to the Frick last November to see the same painting but I ran out of steam and missed seeing it. Why don’t you all tell me how Susanna felt after seeing it for the first time, and how she felt about it after her hospitalization? What was it about the girl who haunted her?
- Susanna’s voice while narrating Girl, Interrupted seemed clam, and convinced me that she wasn’t that crazy, perhaps a little bored or lost. Did any of you notice a change in her narration while reading this book? Did Susanna herself every change? Was she “crazy” enough to be in McLean in the first place?
- How do you feel about seeing her medical records as well as her own account of what happened during those two years? Do they balance the story, or do you feel she was trying to justify her stay by including them in the book?
- Why did Susanna leave out most of the details of her life before entering McLean Hospital? Is she telling us that nothing else should matter to us as the readers?
- Even though Susanna tried to explain madness in two different ways by telling us how madness feels and how it is treated, did you comprehend her particular mental illness? Do you understand madness at all? Any experience with it?
- Did you find it was easier to understand the madness of the other patients rather than the madness of Susanna herself? Do you feel as a reader we can trust her observations of madness, when she was claiming to be mad herself? Is it possible for a person struggling with madness to even have insight of other mental patients?
- Susanna was just eighteen years old when she checked herself into McLean Hospital, the very same hospital that once housed some of my favorite writers and musicians, Sylvia Plath, James Taylor, and Ray Charles. In my opinion McLean seemed like the place the rich sent their troubled relatives. Did any on you think of it this way? Did madness ever rear it’s evil head at McLean?
- Did you find it offensive when Susanna wrote this ”Luckily, I got a marriage proposal and they let me out. In 1968, everybody could understand a marriage proposal?”
- Where you surprised by Susanna’s reactions to Georgina and Lisa in the outside world? Why?
- If Susanna Kaysen was eighteen years old today, would she had spent two years at a place like McLean? What would happen to her in today’s world?
- I’ve mentioned that I felt Susanna went to McLean because she was sexually active. Do you feel sex and madness are related? If Susanna was a teenage boy, would they still have sent him there? Do you feel she was punished rather than treated?
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