Author Guide · Memoir and Fiction
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In 1967, at eighteen, Susanna Kaysen was sent to McLean Hospital outside Boston after a consultation with a doctor that, by her account, lasted about twenty minutes; by his, three hours. She stayed about eighteen months. Twenty-five years later, with a lawyer’s help, she obtained her hospital file, and the memoir she built around it, Girl, Interrupted (1993), was turned down by several publishers before it spent weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and became a 1999 film. Before it she had written two novels; after it came a memoir about her body and a novel about her Cambridge childhood. This guide covers her five key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 key books · 1987–2014 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Susanna Kaysen has published five books: the novels Asa, As I Knew Him (1987), Far Afield (1990) and Cambridge (2014), and the memoirs Girl, Interrupted (1993) and The Camera My Mother Gave Me (2001). Start with Girl, Interrupted, her account of eighteen months in a psychiatric hospital in the late 1960s; below is what each of the others is about and how they connect to it.
Where to Start with Susanna Kaysen
If you want her defining book
→ Girl, Interrupted (1993) — the 1993 memoir of McLean Hospital.
If you want the childhood that came before it
→ Cambridge (2014) — Cambridge in the 1950s, told as a novel.
If you want her fiction
→ Far Afield (1990) — a Harvard anthropologist’s year in the Faroe Islands.
If you want her most personal memoir
→ The Camera My Mother Gave Me (2001).
5 Susanna Kaysen Books, in Order
Asa, As I Knew Him
Her first novel. Dinah, a proofreader in her thirties at a small quasi-academic journal in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has a secret affair with her married editor, Asa Thayer. The longest section reconstructs Asa’s adolescence in the 1950s and his friendship with the reckless Reuben Sola, whose life ends in tragedy, and asks what part Dinah plays in Asa’s memory of him.
Far Afield
Jonathan Brand, a Harvard graduate student in anthropology, spends a year in Skopun, a village in the Faroe Islands between Iceland and Norway, to study it. He wins over his neighbours, helps with sheep-catching and dock work, takes part in the village whale hunt, which unsettles him, and goes home changed. Kaysen herself spent a year in the Faroes in her twenties.
Girl, Interrupted
Short chapters about the roughly eighteen months Kaysen spent on a ward at McLean Hospital from 1967, where she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder: the routines, the staff and the other young women, including Lisa, Georgina and Polly, set beside documents from her own hospital file and her later questions about the diagnosis. The title comes from Vermeer’s painting Girl Interrupted at Her Music. It spent 11 weeks on The New York Times hardcover bestseller list and 23 in paperback, and was filmed in 1999.
The Camera My Mother Gave Me
A short memoir about a sudden, persistent genital pain that no one could explain. Kaysen goes from a gynaecologist to an alternative-medicine practice, a surgeon and her internist, tries cream after cream, turns down surgery, and records what the condition does to her relationship with a live-in boyfriend who does not believe how much it hurts.
Cambridge
A novel whose heroine is called Susanna, a difficult, contrary girl growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, between about 1955 and 1960. Her father’s academic career takes the family to England and to Greece, and she always comes home relieved. Kaysen said she called it fiction because her early memories were unreliable; it took her eight years to write.
In What Order to Read Susanna Kaysen
None of her books continues another, so you can read them in any order. The two early novels are the least known, and both are about outsiders: a woman looking into another man’s past, and an American in a Faroese village.
Read chronologically by her life rather than by publication, the three autobiographical books run Cambridge (childhood, 1950s), Girl, Interrupted (late 1960s) and The Camera My Mother Gave Me (middle age). Cambridge was published twenty years after Girl, Interrupted, and reviewers read it as a kind of prequel.
A reading path
1. Girl, Interrupted (1993)
2. Cambridge (2014)
3. Far Afield (1990)
4. The Camera My Mother Gave Me (2001)
5. Asa, As I Knew Him (1987)
The years · 1948–2014
Quick facts about Susanna Kaysen
- Known for
- Susanna Kaysen is known for Girl, Interrupted, her short, unsentimental memoir of eighteen months in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager in the late 1960s.
- 1948
- Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts
- 1967
- Admitted to McLean Hospital, aged eighteen
- 1999
- The film, with Winona Ryder
- 2014
- Cambridge, a novel of her childhood
- Born
- 11 November 1948, Cambridge, Massachusetts
- Parents
- The economist Carl Kaysen, an MIT professor and adviser to President Kennedy, and Annette Neutra Kaysen
- Schools
- Commonwealth School, Boston, and the Cambridge School of Weston; she did not go to college
- Hospital
- McLean Hospital, from 1967, about eighteen months
- Books
- Five: three novels and two memoirs, 1987–2014
- Adaptation
- Girl, Interrupted (1999), directed by James Mangold
- Lives
- Cambridge, Massachusetts
The red mark is 1993: Girl, Interrupted, her memoir of McLean Hospital.
How Susanna Kaysen Writes: Short Pieces, Plain Sentences
Girl, Interrupted is built from short, self-contained chapters rather than a continuous story, and Kaysen places pages from her own hospital file, which she obtained with a lawyer’s help, next to her memories of the same events. The effect is two versions of one person: the patient the records describe and the writer looking back twenty-five years later. In panicked passages her sentences turn short and choppy.
She insists on the book as something made. “This book is an artifact, I made it, I’m a writer,” she told The Boston Globe in 2014, and she has said readers often took it as a literal record. The same instinct explains Cambridge: she called it a novel because she did not trust her early memories, which let her invent characters such as Vishwa, an Indian music teacher.
Her subjects are outsiders and bodies that will not behave: the patients on the ward, an American anthropologist in a Faroese village, a child who feels lost wherever her father’s work takes the family, a woman whose doctors cannot explain her pain. The books are short, and she writes about difficult material without self-pity or explanation.
Watch
Susanna Kaysen in Conversation with Erin Trahan
WBUR film critic Erin Trahan talks with Susanna Kaysen after a screening of the film of Girl, Interrupted, about her memoir and her relationship to the adaptation. Posted in June 2026. From the official WBUR CitySpace, Boston channel.
Frequently asked questions about Susanna Kaysen’s books
How many books has Susanna Kaysen written?
Five: the novels Asa, As I Knew Him (1987), Far Afield (1990) and Cambridge (2014), and the memoirs Girl, Interrupted (1993) and The Camera My Mother Gave Me (2001).
What are Susanna Kaysen’s books in order?
Asa, As I Knew Him (1987), Far Afield (1990), Girl, Interrupted (1993), The Camera My Mother Gave Me (2001) and Cambridge (2014).
Where should I start with Susanna Kaysen?
With Girl, Interrupted (1993). It is short, it is her best-known book, and the other autobiographical books read best after it: Cambridge shows the childhood before it, The Camera My Mother Gave Me her life decades later.
What is Susanna Kaysen’s most famous book?
Girl, Interrupted (1993), her memoir of about eighteen months at McLean Hospital from 1967. It was a New York Times bestseller for 11 weeks in hardcover and 23 weeks in paperback, and about 1.5 million copies were in print in the US by 2018.
Is Girl, Interrupted a true story?
Yes, it is a memoir of Kaysen’s own stay at McLean Hospital, near Boston, where she was admitted at eighteen in 1967 and diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. It includes documents from her hospital file. Kaysen has stressed that it is still a shaped piece of writing, not a literal record.
Was Girl, Interrupted made into a film?
Yes. Girl, Interrupted (1999) was directed by James Mangold, with Winona Ryder as Kaysen and Angelina Jolie as Lisa; Jolie won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The film renames the hospital Claymoore.
What did Susanna Kaysen think of the film?
She criticised it. Kaysen accused the director of adding “melodramatic drivel” by inventing plot that is not in the book, such as Lisa and Susanna running away together.
Where does the title Girl, Interrupted come from?
From Johannes Vermeer’s painting Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Kaysen compares the girl interrupted in the painting with a young life interrupted by mental illness.
Is Cambridge by Susanna Kaysen a memoir?
It is published as a novel, though its heroine is called Susanna and it follows Kaysen’s own childhood in Cambridge, England and Greece in the late 1950s. She said she chose fiction because her early memories were not reliable.
Where does Susanna Kaysen live?
She was born on 11 November 1948 and has spent most of her life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city at the centre of her novel Cambridge (2014).
Footnotes
- Susanna Kaysen — Wikipedia
- Girl, Interrupted — Wikipedia
- Girl, Interrupted (film) — Wikipedia
- ‘Girl, Interrupted,’ Twenty-Five Years Later — The Paris Review, 2018
- Susanna Kaysen, the chronicler of Cambridge — The Boston Globe, 2014
- Before she was ‘Girl, Interrupted’, she was a girl from Cambridge — NPR, 2014
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“This book is an artifact, I made it, I’m a writer.”
— Susanna Kaysen on Girl, Interrupted, interview with The Boston Globe (2014)
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