Girl, Interrupted

Kaysen’s friend Jim Watson visits her at McLean. She explains that he is the famous American scientist who won a Nobel Prize in the 1950s. He is concerned for Kaysen’s health and remarks that the hospital environment is “terrible” (29). Jim shows Kaysen his car from the window and offers to help her escape the hospital. He suggests they could run away to England, where she could work as a governess. While Kaysen appreciates this gesture, she feels that she cannot envision her escape and is accustomed to living at McLean. Watson leaves and Kaysen joins Lisa to watch more TV.

Kaysen describes McLean as a “parallel world” and claims that events that happened there foreshadowed events in real life. Georgina met her boyfriend Wade in the cafeteria at McLean and believed that he was a spy for the US. While Wade was good looking, Kaysen believes it was rage that made him “irresistible” (32). Wade claimed that his father was also a spy, and that he made trips to Cuba where he killed dozens of people. Kaysen notes that she did not believe Wade, who was a 17-year-old resident at McLean and prone to having violent fits.