School Interrupted Over Religious Group’s Paranoid Objection to “Girl, Interrupted”

Posted on | February 21, 2006

Sometimes I have to wonder if some of these Christian/Family groups do not intentionally make themselves targets of ridicule and such. That is the only logical explanation other than vast stupidity in the case of the Christian Civic League of Maine. The group is up in arms over the reinstatement of the book Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen. As someone who has actually read the book and seen the movie, I think I can talk about it accurately. However I am unable to put my hands on my copy of the book so I have to fly from memory.

What puzzles me is the statements made by group, headed by Michael Heath, actually uses the ChildCare Action Project’s review of the movie, a mostly fictionalized account based on what Kaysen describes in the book, to judge the book. The movie carries an "R" ratting from the Motion Picture Association of America which means that the movie is intended for viewing audiences seventeen and older. Last time I knew, high school freshmen were generally fourteen or fifteen. But more to the point. using the movie to judge the book is asinine. Even more so because the author of "The Record", CCLM’s online news letter, in the February 16th edition laments that no one is bothering to read the book cover-to-cover as if they actually did. The very next day, the newsletter author bitches about a chapter entitled ‘Nineteen Sixty-Eight’ which they say is "a recap of the sixties from the viewpoint of a rebellious student, and recounts among other things, the oppression of the poor and the South Vietnamese by the U.S. government." Well I guess Susanna Kaysen needs to be shipped off to some government re-education camp where she will be force-fed bullshit, made to accept the Vietnam War, and forget that she was a rebellious student in 1968. So basically it seems like these people have a problem with Susanna Kaysen expressing what she went through, thought, and felt during that time.

The sheer idiocy comes from the author’s citing various passages in the book which gives rise to rampant paranoia about kids emulating the contents. For example he cites a passage in the chapter entitled "Another Lisa" in which two women compare heroin tacks on their arms to see who has better looking ones. This is a fucking mental hospital. Do these people think drug users might not have ended up at these facilities in the 1960’s? I can just picture it now… a high school freshmen announces he is going to stat using heroin "because some chicks in a book describing evens more than thirty years old were talking about it! That makes it cool!" Even funnier is citing a passage in the aforementioned chapter ‘Nineteen Sixty-Eight’ which contains "A lengthy discussion of left-wing politics, including government oppression of the poor, and the author’s fantasy of taking over universities, abolishing class differences, and ’sticking her tongue out at policemen.’" How is sticking your tongue out at policemen so evil? Sure it mocks authority but not everyone accepts authority as mindlessly as these people do. For someone bitching about a part in a memoir where two people in a mental hospital discussing drug use, these people seem to be doing a lot of really bad drugs themselves. I say this because, in the absence of some mitigating factor like drugs, we must fall back on the stupidity explanation

But in the end, it has to come down to the power of denial. Michael Heath and his cronies want to deny things like what Susanna Kaysen witnessed and felt during the times in the book. Sorry folks but this shit actually happened. The fact that CCLM had to degenerate to attacking the people who defended the book at the school board meeting, referring to them as "stepping up to the microphone in dirty jeans, rumpled shirts, and unkempt hair", alone shows they have nothing really to stand on other than their own issues of self-identity and denial about certain aspects of this nation’s history, and the reality of the human experience. I am surprised CCLM did not have a fit over the fact one of the chapters in the book is actually a reprint of the criteria for Borderline Personality Disorder, the diagnosis Kaysen was given, as it was in the Diagnostics & Statistical Manual used that the time.

On a side-note, Agape Press makes the mistake of saying that CCLM calls the book fiction. None of the CCLM pages I read discussing the book used the word "fiction" to describe it so I do not know whose error it is. However while the movie is quasi-fictionalized, the book is non-fiction.

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