Word: kaysen
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...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...
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...
...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...
...discussion between Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee '43, John F. Kennedy Library Curator David Powers, and Director of the MIT Program in Science and Society Carl Kaysen was originally planned as the opening for a program on politicians who took their inspiration from Kennedy...
...Kaysen recalled leaving Harvard to become Kennedy's Deputy National Security Advisor. "If you get away from the superficial awe and the glamour and the good looks...on a much deeper level it was always exciting at the White House, gratifyingly so," Kaysen said...