A Tale of Two Crazies
A comparison between Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation
I have no idea why I decided to binge on memoirs, particularly memoirs about crazy young women. Maybe because I was a crazy young woman once, or on the verge of crazy. I can never claim to have ever been as bad off as Elizabeth Wurtzel or even Susanna Kaysen. I was typical crazy with a side of depressive. Maybe because I am writing a book with a protagonist who is a little crazy. Maybe I was just inspired by all the crazy out there in the information-laden webiverse. Regardless, I read these two books back to back and though they have a lot in common, they are completely different.
First, what they have in common:
1. Both are about college age women struggling to make it as adults.
I’m sure there is some study somewhere that proves that the onset of insanity occurs in our twenties. It makes perfect sense. Set free from the parents who were forced by the state to provide us with food and shelter, we discover that we have no actual skills to deal with real life, real job, real rent, reality, etc. Who isn’t depressed in their twenties? Crazy is a rite of passage for creatives.
Wurtzel says, “What I do feel is scariness of being an adult, being alone in this big huge loft with so many CDs and plastic gabs and magazines and pairs of dirty socks and dirty plates on the floor that I can’t even see the floor. I’m sure that I have nowhere to run, that I can’t even walk anywhere without tripping and falling way down, and I know I want out of this mess. I want out. No one will ever love me, I will live and die alone, I will go nowhere fast, I will be nothing at all.” Sounds about right.
2. Both women suffer from depression and suicidal tendencies.
But I don’t want to make light of Wurtzel and Kaysen’s illness. Yes, I can relate to depression, like that big, fat, dark one I fell into sophomore year of college, but I came out of it pretty strong without medication. The idea of dropping off the edge and losing my mind consistently frightened me and pushed me to get better.
According to Kaysen, “Insanity comes in two basic varieties: slow and fast…. The predominant quality of the slow form is viscosity. Experience is thick. Perceptions are thickened and dulled. Time is slow, dripping slowly through clogged filter of thickened perception. The body temperature is low. The pulse is sluggish… In contrast to viscosity’s cellular coma, velocity endows every platelet and muscle fiber with a mind of its own, a means of knowing and commenting on its own behavior. There is too much perception, and beyond the plethora of perceptions, a plethora of thoughts about the perceptions and about the fact of having perceptions.” Kaysen was the slower variety of insane, while Wurtzel was definitely the faster, often going on drug and sex binges.
I never once considered suicide. In honesty, I can’t fathom that trip. I have been on the other side of suicide, i.e.; knowing people who have committed to it, and it is not cool. Thankfully, both of these authors found help, though Wurtzel does make an attempt as a cry for help.
3. Both women are medicated.
Help came in the form of medication, especially for Wurtzel, hence, the title of her book. For Wurtzel, it took years of experimentation under various psychiatrists’ guidance to find the perfect formula to keep her sane and alive. She was lucky to be one of the first people to be administered Prozac successfully. Kaysen was also medicated, but for her, it was a typical dose of sedatives commonly passed out at mental hospitals during the 60s. She doesn’t really spend any time in her memoir discussing the merits or disadvantages of drugs on her condition.
Here’s how they differ:
1. Wurtzel is in the 90's. Kaysen is in the 60's.
The thirty years between these decades showed a huge evolution in the way people looked at the mentally ill. For one, in the sixties, women were commonly committed for very little, which is what seemed to have happened to Kaysen. One of her symptoms was promiscuity. Can you imagine if we committed young women in the nineties for promiscuity? Our nut houses would be stocked full of insecure attention seeking teens.
2. Kaysen is hospitalized, Wurtzel is not.
In the nineties, the idea of “functional” crazy was coming into fashion and we recognized the possibility of mental illness that could be treated with drugs. In this way, Wurtzel avoided mental health institutes all together. She mostly relied on the support of friends who underwent the impossible task of trying to help her. Of course, they couldn’t,
“By the time I stumble into the bathroom and slam both doors and curl up tight on the floor, I’m certain that there’s no way they’ll ever understand the philosophical underpinnings of the state I’m in.”
Kaysen’s memoir mainly deals with what it was like inside the hospital from day to day, the characters she comes into contact with, their illnesses and quirks, and the nurses and doctors who treat them.
When Kaysen is released from the hospital, her way of combating reoccurring depression is quite different from Wurtzel, avoidance.
“Don’t ask me what life means or how we know reality or why we have to suffer so much. Don’t talk about how nothing feels real, how everything is coated with gelatin and shining like oil in the sun.”
3. Kaysen is less self-involved. Wurtzel is constantly talking about herself and how her parents fucked her up.
Because Kaysen is institutionalized, her book is of a wider scope, looking at the conditions of hospitals during that time and the people who resided there. Kaysen often speaks as a group,
“For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison. Though we were cut off from the world and all the trouble we enjoyed stirring up out there, we were also cut off from the demands and expectations that had driven us crazy.”
Kaysen sees a lot of good in the hospital, but she is a star patient with many privileges in a low security unit. At one point she visits a higher security part of the hospital and freaks out. But ultimately, Kaysen is provided a support system, as strange as it is, that Wurtzel is not.
Wurtzel needs to rely on her friends, therapist and family who find her barely comprehensible. She has a lot of good fortune in her life, like going to Harvard and finding quality journalism jobs while still in college, and yet she can never appreciate them. It seems for Wurtzel, when things are going well, she needs to screw them up. While this can be really annoying for a reader, her problems feel more real and in our face. Her lack of confinement in the world allows her to get wildly out of hand and fuck everything up. Her crazy is apparent.
It’s difficult to like Wurtzel. She ends up sounding like a privileged brat, yet this book is a great snapshot of a time and generation. So is Kaysen’s look at a period where women were overcommitted and mental health was even less understood than it is now. Ultimately, I preferred Girl, Interrupted to Prozac Nation because Kaysen’s writing style is beautiful and prosaic. I love how she often writes from the point of view of “we.” Where Wurtzel rambles endlessly about her problems, Kaysen is able to step back and take a more objective look at her situation and those around her. Not surprisingly, Wurtzel wrote her memoir only a couple of years after the time it occurs, whereas Kaysen has about twenty years of retrospection to contemplate her early years. Maybe you never picked up Girl, Interrupted because the movie with Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie was so bad, but the book is much better.
