"Girl, Interrupted"

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Girl, Interrupted In Susanna Kaysen's autobiographical book entitled "Girl, Interrupted," readers get a first hand look at Borderline Personality Disorder and what life is like in a mental institution. Susanna recounts her two years in a Boston psychiatric hospital, McLean, detailing her thoughts on everyday life and the people around her. We get a close glimpse on what life is like to be emotionally unstable and unbalanced, suicide, and others who are also unstable like Susanna herself. Most importantly, though, we see the parallel universes of madness and sanity that Susanna finds herself entrapped and engulfed in, struggling to free herself as well as find herself.

Parallel Universes, as Kaysen describes in her book, are worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, and perhaps even the dead. She says that these worlds exist alongside this world, the real world, but are not in it. It's easy to slip into a parallel universe.

People ask her how she "got in there" and Kaysen would reply, "What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, "˜it's easy.'" The laws of physics are suspended within a parallel universe. It operates in accordance to the way in which it wants to react, or rather, how it feels like reacting. If it goes up, and doesn't want to come down, it won't. Same with time; not only can it go forward, but it can go backwards, in circles, even skip if it wants. Kaysen also explains that once you are in a parallel universe, you can easily see the world from which you came. It is invisible to the outside world, however.

One example Kaysen gives of a parallel universe...