The title “Girl, Interrupted” did not begin, contrary to popular belief, as a best-selling book or an Academy Award winning film. It’s the title of the 1660 Johannes Vermeer painting which profoundly affected Susanna Kaysen, enough to cause her to name her memoir after it.

In 1967, at the age of 18, Kaysen was admitted into a mental hospital after a brief session with a new psychiatrist. She spent the better part of the next two years in the now infamous McLean hospital, which housed such famous residents as Ray Charles and Sylvia Plath. The institution was just as renowned for its progressive methods of treatment as it was for its star patients.

Everyone is currently in a state of shock over the fact that anyone would allow a young girl to spend a portion of her youth, even in 1967, in a mental hospital with no real reasoning other than an ambiguous diagnosis of “personality disorder.”

No one tells Kaysen what the term “personality disorder” really means. Left to her own conclusions, Kaysen writes “I imagined my character as a plate or shirt that had been manufactured incorrectly and was therefore useless.” She doesn’t discover until 25 years later the specific quirks in her personality that deemed it disordered.

Kaysen makes no judgment against the institution which housed her for nearly two years or the people who put her there. She simply tells her story and leaves readers to come to their own conclusions about the rights and wrongs of what was done to her.

Instead Kaysen concentrates on telling the stories of those locked up with her, namely the sociopath Lisa, the role for which actress Angelina Jolie won an Oscar in the film version of “Girl.” Lisa is the crazy one in a group of crazies, constantly escaping, stealing all the light bulbs in the ward, or yelling at the nurses for no apparent reason. She’s the other main character of Kaysen’s story. She makes the residents laugh and keeps the nurses on their toes.

Polly is the disfigured victim of a suicide attempt by fire, calmly accepting her appearance until the day she wonders, “Who would kiss a person like that, a person with no skin?” Kaysen and the others slowly watched her fade after that, dulled by her medication and her depression.

Other characters come and go: Georgina, Cynthia, Daisy, and the one they called the Martian’s Girlfriend. They all affect Kaysen in different ways, and she passes that on to her readers.

Throughout “Girl,” Kaysen seems to agree with the fact that she isn’t altogether right in the head, but she questions the extremes to which her family and so-called doctors go in order to make her well again, whatever that means.

She writes, “Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can’t go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. Then, depending on how the rest of the family is feeling, that person is kept inside or snatched out, to prove something about the family’s health.”

Kaysen rarely touches on the subject of her family in her memoir, but they have an underlying presence in the book. McLean is not a cheap place, and someone is paying for Kaysen’s two-year stay.

Even though Kaysen accepts her stay in the hospital because it is a safe place for her and she is taken care of, she knows she isn’t completely nuts. She writes, “I have to admit, though, that I knew I wasn’t mad … I knew I wasn’t mad and that they wouldn’t keep me there, locked up in a loony bin.”

The truth is that they did lock Kaysen up, and they did leave her there. Even today, as a successful writer, she questions her sanity every day. She writes, “I wasn’t convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was. Some people say that having any conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity, but I’m not sure that’s true. I still think about it. I’ll always have to think about it.”

Kaysen’s book isn’t what one would expect from a bitter ex-mental patient bent on getting revenge for the two years that were stolen from her. But she doesn’t need bitterness and anger to get her point across to the world. All she needs is to tell her story. Kaysen paints the picture, and then she leaves it to be interpreted by her readers.

It’s refreshing to see someone stand up for an issue without beating a person over the head with her views. The memoir doesn’t bog down a reader with depressing facts. Instead, “Girl” is kept lighthearted and funny. Kaysen doesn’t write in chronological order, but keeps her chapters short and flowing together by topic. Just as the Vermeer painting “Girl, Interrupted” inspired Kaysen years ago, her own version of “Girl, Interrupted” serves as an inspiration to readers today.

4 Stars

Rating based on a 5 Star scale.