Best Selling Books by Susanna Kaysen

30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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. Her memoir of the next two years is a "poignant, honest ... triumphantly funny ... and heartbreaking story" (The New York Times Book Review). WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen''s memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

Susanna Kaysen, who wrote about her teenage depression in the bestseller Girl, Interrupted, now takes on another taboo: her vagina–which suddenly and inexplicably starts to hurt. And neither Kaysen’s cheery gynecologist, nor her internist, nor a laconic “vulvologist” has the cure. An alternative health nurse suggests direct application of tea, baking soda, and boric acid. Others recommend novocaine, oatmeal, “bio-feedback,” and anti-depressants. Nothing works. As sex becomes more and more painful, Kaysen’s relationship with her boyfriend disintegrates and she turns to her best friends, her wicked sense of humor, and finally wry self-reflection to get herself through. Using this unusual lens, Kaysen challenges us to think in new ways about the centrality and power of sexuality. The Camera My Mother Gave Me is an unexpected and revelatory book from one of our most candid, insightful and consistently surprising writers.

Dinah Sachs and Asa Thayer have had a love affair, conducted in afternoons stolen from the office of the magazine where they work. But now that the affair is over, Dinah, in an act of lingering passion, invents a narrative of Asa''s youth, imagining the events that shaped the "happy, handsome man" who, in her words, "was born to stomp on my heart." Witty and sexy, funny and immediate, Asa, As I Knew Him is a a seductive dialogue between love and memory, obsession and illusion.

Two family sabbaticals across the Atlantic and a brilliant orchestra conductor shape the perspectives of a young woman from 1950s Harvard Square, who develops new ways of thinking about music, love, and art while struggling with feelings of being a perpetual outsider.

A compulsively readable novel of enormous charm swimming in the cuisine and culture of the Faroe Islands from the author of Girl, Interrupted. Jonathan Brand, a graduate student in anthropology, has decided to do his fieldwork in the remote Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic. But, despite his Harvard training, he can barely understand, let alone "study," the culture he encounters. From his struggles with the local cuisine to his affair with the Danish woman the locals want him to marry, Jonathan is both repelled by and drawn into the Faroese way of life. Wry and insightful, Far Afield reveals Susanna Kaysen''s gifts of imagination, satire, and compassion.

En 1967, después de una sesión con un psiquiatra al que nunca había visto antes, Susanna Kaysen, de dieciocho años, fue internada en el Hospital McLean. Pasó la mayor parte de los dos años siguientes en la sala de chicas de un hospital psiqui᭭trico muy reconocido por haber tenido entre sus pacientes a celebridades como Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor y Ray Charles. Las memorias de Kaysen nos ofrecen un retrato vívido de un grupo de jóvenes que han sido internadas debido a diferentes dolencias psíquicas. Lúcida e irónica, la autora cuestiona los procedimientos de diagnóstico y curación, contraponiendo la complejidad de su propia experiencia con el agarrotamiento cultural de un sistema que muchas veces actúa como percutor del sufrimiento psicológico. Traducido por primera vez al español, «Inocencia interrumpida» propone una mirada inteligente, piadosa y no exenta de humor sobre la fragilidad del espíritu y la borrosa frontera entre cordura y locura.

Adolescente mal dans sa peau, l''auteur a été internée dans un hôpital psychiatrique. Elle décrit ce milieu et les méthodes "modernes" de traitement psychiatrique. Elle réfléchit sur la frontière fragile qui sépare la folie de la normalité.