Word Revel

Book blogger, recent Sociology grad in her twenties. Stares at labels when no books are in sight. Disproportionately reads YA. This is a companion blog to http://wordrevel.com.

Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted - Susanna Kaysen Actual rating: 2.5 stars

Initial thougths: Given that the author was committed to a psychiatric hospital and Girl, Interrupted is a memoir chronicling that time, I didn't think the book did it all that much justice. Little was actually shared through the book that an observer couldn't have written. The advantage of the first-person perspective of someone who actually experienced two years at McLean Hospital didn't translate.

However, there were explorations on what it means to be mentally ill versus healthy, which against the backdrop of the 1960s did seem pertinent — such as homosexuality no longer being diagnosed as an illness. These sections somewhat made up for the lack of depth conveyed with regards to the actual experiences.

Perhaps the fact that I watched the movie adaptation for a sociology course on medicine and health a couple of year ago affected my expectations a fair bit. After dissecting and analysing the movie, I thought there'd be so much more meat to the primary text. Sadly, that wasn't the case. I didn't walk away from the book with the impression that I gained all that much beyond a collection of thoughts on whether diagnoses of the patients were justified in the first place.

Currently reading

A Corner of White
Andrew Eiden, Peter McGowan, Fiona Hardingham, Jaclyn Moriarty, Kate Reinders
Post-TV: Piracy, Cord-Cutting and the Future of Television
Michael Strangelove
A Court of Thorns and Roses
Sarah J. Maas
Girls, Texts, Cultures
Clare Bradford, Mavis Reimer