Susanna Kaysen, whose book "Girl, Interrupted" details her experiences in a psychiatric facility, tells students she still has bouts of depression, but recovers and goes on.
Susanna Kaysen didn't go to college. She spent the late '60s, what should have been her college years, getting a different kind of education at a different kind of Ivy League institution.
After swallowing a bottle of aspirin, the then 18-year-old was admitted to McLean Hospital, an exclusive, campus-like private psychiatric facility in Belmont, Mass., for a brief "rest" that lasted the better part of two years. Twenty-five years later, Kaysen recorded the experience in her third book, "Girl, Interrupted."
"It was the equivalent of college - an elite junior college, one that was very hard to get into," she told her audience during a Nov. 16 reading at Brown. And it was "an important informative experience," without which she "probably wouldn't be standing here now," she said.
Kaysen came to Brown at the invitation of the Sarah Doyle Women's Center and visiting lecturer Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, who's used "Girl, Interrupted" for the past two years in her "Life Writing" course.
"It's one of the most moving pieces of life writing I've ever read," she told the audience in introducing the author.
Kaysen's book has become widely read beyond the classroom as well since being made into an Academy Award-winning movie of the same name two years ago. Her appearance in Salomon Center attracted a packed hall of almost exclusively female students - young women who could easily have been the peers and companions of the Susanna the author recalled in her 1993 memoir.
Kaysen is decades removed from that vulnerable teen now - her dark hair is peppered with gray, and she reaches for glasses before she can begin her reading - but she confessed she's "not all that different," just older. She still struggles with periodic bouts of depression, recovers again and goes on.
"Not being 18 helps. Anything is better than that," she said. "When I'm not depressed, I'm happy and - importantly - productive."
Perhaps tellingly, Kaysen chose to share the lighter passages from a dog-eared copy of her best known work with the audience. She charmed them as she reflected on the relationship between artistry and madness, poked fun at hospital regulations and analyzed the patients' own self-imposed social hierarchy. She recounted the banter between herself and those friends as they boasted of their sexual escapades - stopping suddenly as she read a graphic exchange of bravado, one-upmanship and four-letter words.
"We really did sit around talking like that," she confessed, laughing as her face colored. "I almost never read this one."
Despite Kaysen's easy humor, there's no missing the suffering and tragedy in the lives of those she portrayed in "Girl."
"There's something permanently disquieting about being labeled so deviant that you have to be removed from society," she said. Writing about her hospitalization gave her a vehicle to thumb her nose at the experience, she added.
While Kaysen avoided the most personal questions pitched by her audience and declined to assess the current state of mental health care, she did share her take on Hollywood's version of "Girl" - she didn't care for it, wasn't involved in the screen adaptation and "did it for the money."
And she had some advice for young adults who may be dealing with their own angst.
"You can kill yourself later," she said. "Put it off, and you may change your mind. If not, there's plenty of time for that later on."