Girl, Interrupted

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1993

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Chapters 16-20

Chapters 21-25

Chapters 26-30

Chapters 31-34

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Meat

Kaysen uses the image of packaged meat to represent her own emotional pain and feelings of confinement. She explains that when she fainted in the grocery store the last thing that she saw was packaged meat. After she survived this experience, she was repulsed by meat, and became a vegetarian. She attributes this to the fact that both she and the meat were “bruised, bleeding, and imprisoned in a tight wrapping” (42).

Kaysen’s metaphor comparing herself to meat starkly explains her attitude and detachment toward herself that led to her attempted suicide. The image of meat is conjured throughout the memoir further as patients burn themselves, searing skin, and when Kaysen participates in self-harm. She describes her compulsion of wrist-banging as “slow, steady, mindless” as if she is tenderizing herself like one tenderizes meat for consumption (139).

Patterns

Kaysen explains that part of her confusion as a teen had to do with feeling irritated and anxious about patterns, such as on rugs, curtains, or tile floors. She explains that in addition to her imagining different things within the patterns, she also felt anxious about the contrasts that patterns forced her to think about. For Kaysen, patterns represented opposing forces in life. She explains that the black and white checkered floor at the ice cream parlor had such an effect on her, writing, “The contrast got under my skin […] The floor meant Yes, No, This, That, Up, Down, Day, Night—all the indecisions and opposites that were bad enough in life without having them spelled out for you on the floor” (54).

Girl Interrupted at Her Music

Girl Interrupted at Her Music, by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, is a painting which is now exhibited in the art gallery The Frick in New York. This painting has great significance in the book, as it is the inspiration behind the memoir’s title. Kaysen saw this painting in person twice, once as a teen before her hospitalization and another time as an adult. Her memory about encountering this painting supports Kaysen’s view of the fluid and subjective nature of perceiving others and oneself, since she felt the girl “had changed a lot in sixteen years” (150). She strongly identifies with the girl in the painting, who represents herself as a teenager. When Kaysen is young, she feels the girl is anxious and “urgent”, however, when Kaysen is older and more reflective, she perceives the girl to be sad and overlooked, like she was at that age (150).

The interpretations of the girl by Kaysen directly reflect her outlook on life at the time in which she viewed the painting. A man stands over the girl, holding sheet music, interrupting her activity. The man symbolizes Kaysen’s view of confinement in her teenage years, and morphs into a source of sadness from constriction as she views it as an adult. The painting overall serves as a metaphor for Kaysen’s experience, as she is stifled for attempting to discover her authentic self by patriarchal society that, instead of seeking to understand her, interrupts her growth with institutionalization.

Bones

During a stressful day at McLean, Kaysen begins to anxiously wonder whether her body has bones. She becomes so worried she wants to open her hand to see if there were any bones inside, and she laments that much of her insides are “slippery and elusive” (96). Kaysen’s desire to have “a normal human hand, with bones” echoes her longing to have a normal, healthy character and personality (96). Her bones are symbolic of her innermost characteristics that she cannot always understand or access, but that are inherent to who she is.