Susanna Kaysen

My roommate Georgina came in swiftly and totally, during her junior year at Vassar. She was in a theater watching a movie when a tidal wave of blackness broke over her head. The entire world was obliterated—for a few minutes. She knew she had gone crazy. She looked around the theater to see if it had happened to everyone, but all the other people were engrossed in the movie. She rushed out, because the darkness in the theater was too much when combined with the darkness in her head.

And after that? I asked her.

A lot of darkness, she said.

Sometimes the world you came from looks huge and menacing, quivering like a vast pile of jelly

She was never unhappy. She was kind and comforting to those who were unhappy. She never complained. She always had time to listen to other people’s complaints. She was faultless, in her impermeable tight pink-and-white casing. Whatever had driven her, whispered “Die!” in her once-perfect, now-scarred ear, she had immolated it.

They took away the belt so she couldn’t hang herself.
They didn’t understand that Lisa would never hang herself.

Actually, it was only part of myself I wanted to kill: the part that wanted to kill herself, that dragged me into the suicide debate and made every window, kitchen implement, and subway station a rehearsal for tragedy.

What about me was so deranged that in less than half an hour a doctor would pack me off to the nuthouse?

I have to admit, though, that I knew I wasn’t mad.
It was a different precondition that tipped the balance: the state of contrariety. My ambition was to negate. The world, whether dense or hollow, provoked only my negations. When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep; when I was supposed to speak, I was silent; when a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it. My hunger, my thirst, my loneliness and boredom and fear were all weapons aimed at my enemy, the world. They didn’t matter a whit to the world, of course, and they tormented me, but I got a gruesome satisfaction from my sufferings. They proved my existence. All my integrity seemed to lie in saying No.
So the opportunity to be incarcerated was just too good to resist. It was a very big No—the biggest No this side of suicide.
Perverse reasoning. But back of that perversity, I knew I wasn’t mad and that they wouldn’t keep me there, locked up in a loony bin.

Our hospital was famous and had housed many great poets and singers. Did the hospital specialize in poets and singers, or was it that poets and singers specialized in madness?

Sylvia Plath had come and gone

It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.