No matter how much thought she put into it, Susana didn't know whether she belonged in the hospital because she was crazy or if she really didn't belong there at all. .
is Susanna Kaysen's story of her journey to madness and back. There were many turning points in her life. I think one of them was watching the death of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy on television. She realized that there was a whole other world outside of the hospital, one that she doesn't remember much about. The major watershed moment for Susanna came at the end of the book. It was the Vermeer painting that warned her of something. Susanna mentioned that the girl in the painting looked up from her work to warn her. Sixteen years later she went back to that same painting that bares the title of the book "Girl, interrupted at her music." After seeing this painting again she realized that her life has been "interrupted by the music of being seventeen" and her life had been snatched and fixed on canvas.
The main setting in the book is McLean Hospital right outside of Boston, Massachusetts. It was a large building with long white halls. Just inside the hospital there were three phone booths, a couple of single rooms, the living room and an eat-in kitchen. Further into the building there are more bedrooms, a nursing station, conference room, and hydrotherapy tub room. The hospital setting affects the characters in many ways. The patients were rarely allowed to leave the ward, open a window, or even shave their legs without supervision. They were limited to the occasional walk to the ice cream shop. They had "checks" every 10 to 30 minutes. This was when the nurses came and checked on the patients. They even did it all though the night. The space between each check depended on how much the hospital staff could trust you. I"d say that going into a facility like that would make a sane person go crazy.
I believe that this book is mostly about self-discovery.