Girl Interrupted

"But then they can come back! That is what I love about this book. At the end when people come back into life and she sees them coming back into life. That is important. You have this cataclysmic experience in the hospital. But by the end she comes full circle and she comes out again. And the nature of her delusions I really identified with. The disbelief of reality—she has to see x-rays of her bones to believe they are there. What is happening in her head has more hyper reality than the real world. Having gone through periods of OCD when you feel you are in control of so much, when someone tries to tell you what is really happening, you really don’t believe them. Linguistically she collapses—she goes into staccato sentences. I still struggle with this—in anxiety there are feelings I have trouble vocalising. In this book and in her use of language she explores how the brain tumbles. A lot of people with mental health problems do struggle with language. Even if you want to tell someone how you feel you can’t find the words. So you just come out in a mumble, or a cliché, or you just stay quiet."