The Unconfessional Confessionalist

By ANDREA SACHS/CAMBRIDGE

People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy.

-- Girl, Interrupted

Not since Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar has a personal account of life in a mental hospital achieved as much popularity and acclaim as Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted. Published in hard cover a year ago, it immediately became a surprise best seller. The paperback edition (Vintage; $10) is now firmly entrenched on the best-seller list. Kaysen has received hundreds of letters from readers who have also been hospitalized for psychiatric problems, and on her just completed tour of 16 cities to promote the paperback, dozens of people whispered their own stories of mental illness to her. To many, the author has become a cult figure; the irony is that she actually wants to keep her life private.

Girl, Interrupted has a wary tone, and Kaysen greets a visitor at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a similar air of caution. Is the door half open or half closed? Her apprehension is understandable, given the subject she has written about: her two-year stay as a teenager on a ward for girls at McLean, a private psychiatric hospital outside Boston. Kaysen wrote two novels, Far Afield and Asa, as I Knew Him, before she began her literary journey back to McLean. In fact, she spent more than 20 years avoiding the topic. "I never discussed it. I didn't know what to say," she recalls. If she did bring it up, "it was a good way to irritate or frighten people." But in the late 1980s Kaysen found that memories of McLean kept surfacing. The result was her witty, poignant memoir.

Kaysen's wood-frame home in Cambridge, only two blocks from Harvard Square, displays the same elegant spareness as her writing. On a table sits a copy of Cigarettes Are Sublime, an elegy to smoking written by Richard Klein. She is defiant on the subject. "Everyone should have a vice, and everybody does," she says, drawing on a Marlboro. "Immortality was never my goal."

Stubbornness and defiance helped Kaysen to land in a psychiatric hospital and prevail as a writer. The daughter of an economics professor, she grew up in Cambridge, a privileged setting where going to college seemed inevitable. But Kaysen, who hated school, would have none of it. "I was very sulky and tantrumy," she says. She lived in a commune in Cambridge after graduating from high school.

In April 1967, months after a half-hearted suicide attempt in which she swallowed 50 aspirin, Kaysen was plunked into McLean by a psychiatrist who had met her only half an hour earlier. "You need a rest," he told her, promising a stay of several weeks. Instead she spent two years in a "parallel universe," a sorority house of sorts, but with barred windows, a ban on sharp objects and constant monitoring. "We ate with plastic," writes Kaysen of McLean. "It was a perpetual picnic, our hospital." After leaving in 1969, Kaysen continued to resist college, becoming a copy editor and eventually a self-educated writer. She also learned to live with her own distinctive personality. "There's a great, long literary tradition of being off your rocker," she says wryly. (Indeed, The Bell Jar is set at McLean, and poet Robert Lowell spent time there and wrote about it.)

In Cambridge, Kaysen typically spends mornings working at her electric typewriter, with Miss Bliss, her tabby, curled up nearby. She sporadically sees a psychologist she refers to as "my tune-up woman." Money is no longer a problem; the rights to the book have already been optioned to Hollywood. Still, literary success doesn't bring everything. Kaysen was divorced in her 20s, and she confides, "The best-seller list doesn't get you a date, so don't hope."

As Kaysen becomes famous for writing a confessional book, it is her reticence that is most striking. She avoids public-policy debates about Prozac and mental-health coverage. "People think I'm a psychology expert, but I'm not," she says. "I'm a writer." Despite an appearance on Oprah, she has no intention of becoming a poster child for mental illness. "I don't believe I have any obligation to let people into my private life," she says. This may seem like a curious attitude for someone who has made public her years in a mental hospital, but even in her book, Kaysen maintains a distance. She does not answer nearly as many questions as she raises, including the ultimate one of whether she should have been hospitalized at all. Nor does she dwell on the details of her own history. Instead Kaysen concentrates on describing what life in a psychiatric ward is really like. That approach gives Girl, Interrupted its feeling of universality and makes Kaysen seem like Everypatient to a grateful readership.