Kaysen Point

When author Susanna Kaysen was 18 years old, her life began to unravel. She was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a commune of students and hangers-on and working at a series of meaningless jobs. Despite a childhood spent in the academic enclaves of the East Coast—her father was a professor of economics—she was not headed for college. "I always hated school," she claims. "I had no attention span and no tolerance for being wrong." This was in 1967. "I was terribly unhappy," she says now. "I didn't have any structure

to rebel against. I didn't have anything to do."

What she ended up doing was going to a psychiatrist. After a brief interview, he made a phone call and escorted her out of his office and into a waiting cab. The cab took her to an exclusive private mental hospital outside of Boston where she spent most of the next two years. This period of confinement is the subject of her third book, an eloquent and unexpectedly funny memoir called Girl, Interrupted (Turtle Bay).

Kaysen, now 44, still lives in Cambridge. Her apartment is a bright and airy perch on the top floor of a house at the edge of Harvard Square. The author of two novels, Kaysen is a slim, meticulous woman of carefully defined tastes and scathing wit. Her wardrobe consists

primarily of voluminous cashmere sweaters and tiny Italian sandals, and she peppers her conversation with passionately held opinions and historical and geographical facts and figures. ''I only talk about the things I know well."

In Girl, she writes, "Back then I didn't know that I—or anyone—could make a life out of boyfriends and literature." After years of struggle, she seems to have achieved the life she always wanted. 'T never get dressed unless I have to. I stay in my nightgown and read books on my sofa. Any other kind of life demands more energy than I've got."

Kaysen started writing her first nonfiction book while working on her second novel. The short, disjointed pieces that came to her "almost automatically" gradually developed into a cohesive whole. Kaysen went through the grueling process of reading 350 pages of medical records from her stay at the hospital, excerpts from which are included in her memoir. "I wanted to contrast the clinical viewpoint with the subjective experience, to expose the depressing detachment of the medical language," she says.

The success of Girl is causing more than a few interruptions in Kaysen's life. Her phone has been ringing steadily, and the technology-shy author has even purchased an answering machine. "A friend told me I'm waiting for Scott Fitzgerald to call up and ask me

to dance. The truth is, I think he's right."

STEPHEN MCCAULEY

Vanities