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Week of 17 September 1999 Vol. III, No. 6 Feature Article Girl, adapted Kaysen's memoir becomes major motion picture By Eric McHenry When Susanna Kaysen learned that Columbia/Sony wanted to make a movie out of her memoir, Girl, Interrupted, she had two distinct reactions. "I was delighted, of course," she says, "and I also thought, what in the world are they going to do with it?" The book, published by Random House in 1993, recounts the 18 months Kaysen spent as a teenager undergoing psychiatric treatment at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. She suspected it wouldn't lend itself to screen adaptation, she says, because so much of its plot development necessarily takes place in the psyche of the central character. "I think writing is a much more forgiving medium, in some respects. There's much more room for mumbling and rumination in a piece that's written down," says Kaysen, who teaches in the graduate Creative Writing Program at BU. "Things have to happen in a movie. You can't just have the McNeil-Lehrer Report." Knowing this, she says, kept her from being upset or even surprised when she saw that the screenwriters were embellishing and taking liberties. "I read the screenplay, and there are quite a few scenes and events that didn't actually happen," says Kaysen. "And I could see why the people doing the adaptation had to add those. Otherwise it would have been a very static picture. "I think the fact that it took six years to make it into a movie," she adds, "is an indication that it wasn't so clear how to do it." Kaysen, who is also a successful novelist, says she was a peripheral figure in the production of the film, which stars Winona Ryder in the principal role and features supporting performances by Vanessa Redgrave and Whoopi Goldberg. Kaysen spent only two days on location in Harrisburg, Pa., "which means I saw about four minutes of the movie," she says. "It seemed great. And they work so hard. I was very impressed by how difficult it is to make a movie." Girl, Interrupted is a personal, anecdotal, and darkly comic look at psychiatric care in the late '60s. Kaysen exposes diagnosis for the guessing game that it so often is, and shows how clinical definitions of mental illness -- at once overbroad and inflexible -- can be barriers to effective treatment of conditions that are profoundly particular. Susanna Kaysen, author of Girl, Interrupted, at a 1997 Creative Writing Program faculty reading. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky Despite its being an unlikely candidate for adaptation, the book set movie-making wheels in motion even before it was published. According to Kaysen, Ryder saw the book in galley form, "and apparently it knocked her socks off -- really captured her imagination." Columbia bought the option shortly after its release, but it was Ryder's desire to play Kaysen and coproduce the film that ensured its being made. Before visiting the movie's set earlier this year, Kaysen says, she had been unaware of Ryder's long-standing interest in the project. "I absolutely did not th