Girl, interrupted

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele -- Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and James Taylor -- as for its progressive methods of treatment. This is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of mental illness and recovery.