Study Questions for Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted
by Thad Curtz (for Politics of Identity)

1. The fundamental question, as always - What can this book contribute to deepening your understanding of the program's theme, the politics of identity, or to raising new questions for you about the issues we are working on...

2. Begin at the beginning - the title...

You don't find out where the title of this book comes from, really, until the last chapter. You might want to go look at the pictures that it's about; they are on the Open Reserve shelf for Politics of Identity. There are really four sets of them mentioned - the Fragonards, two other Vermeers, the Vermeer called Girl Interrupted at Her Music, and the Rembrandts.

What does she wait so long to tell us about the title? She tells this story to one of her therapists in the middle of the book, on p. 85. What's her relationship to the experience like at that point? How does it compare to her relationship to it at the end of the book?

The last chapter is called "Girl, Interrupted", as if it were somehow the same thing as the whole book - do you see any ways in which one might say that? Is this book like one or the other kind of Vermeer? She doesn't sound very happy about how the picture of the girl works when she describes it in the middle of p. 167. Does this book aspire to more than that? If so, how?

3. Who's telling the story? And when?

Of course, Susanna Kaysen is telling the story...right? At some points, we are clearly hearing Susanna Kaysen now - grown-up and presumably sane. At other points, we clearly seem to be hearing the story as it was experienced by Susanna Kaysen then - adolescent and presumably mad. Look carefully at some of each of these stretches and try making a list about what you can say about what each of them is like, just from how they talk...

4. Sequence (Sequence is always a question of time - like music, like something interrupted.)

Is the book organized chronologically? Is it organized in steps like Carpentier's book, lost or not? Why don't the chapters have numbers? If it is organized chronologically, is she getting progressively better during the course of the book? What do you rely on in trying to decide? She talks a lot about time during the book... how does the writing itself structure your experience of time as you read it?

5. Why is she telling this story?

On page 123, she says:

I stopped telling people. There was no advantage in telling people. 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 and the me who didn't talk about it was big and strong and busy.

I began to feel revulsion too. Insane people. I had a good nose for them and I didn't want to have anything to do with them. I still don't. ... Don't talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shine like oil in the sun....

6. My diagnosis...

"You've been picking at yourself", the doctor says, as he packs her into the taxi. What do you think of that as a description of this book? Are there other things about her "diagnosis" as she anatomizes it in the two chapters from p. 147 to p. 159 which seem to remain as part of who she is now, especially in who she is as a writer and how she talks and how she relates to her material?
(For example - marked mood shifts? inappropriately intense anger? identity disturbance? social contrariness and a generally pessimistic outlook?)

7. She talks about audiences throughout the book, from the opening remark, "People ask, How did you get in there?" to the last chapter, which is all about being the audience for works of art, like the paintings or like this book. In fact, she talks to "you" directly quite a lot. How does she treat you, and how does it make you feel?

8. There is another set of voices in the book too - her medical records. How does she present them? Why does she put the pieces she uses in the places where she does? Their language is of course, "medical". Figure out as much as you can about what makes language "medical", and about how "medical" language works, in the records and in the conversations in the book where it also appears. What does it have to do with the politics of the doctors' or nurses' identities? With the politics of the patients' identities?

9. Diagnoses

Work out a description of Lisa. Is she crazy? Work out a description of Georgina. Is she? How about Torrey?

10. Madness and language

After you read some of this book, go back and re-read some of the chapter about Yolanda's hospitalization in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. Do these attempts to communicate what it's like to have a breakdown have anything in common? How are they different?

8. "You'd have to wonder how much of what I'm telling you is true and how much imagined." (p. 151)

For example - how about:

Wrist-scratching! I thought I'd invented it. Wrist-banging to be precise.

This is where people stop being able to follow me. This is the sort of stuff you get locked up for. Nobody knew I was doing it, though. I never told anyone, until now. (p. 152)