Susanna Kaysen

When women are angry at men, they call them heartless. When men are angry at women, they call them crazy.

The world didn’t stop because we weren’t in it anymore; far from it. Night after night tiny bodies fell to the ground on our TV screen: black people, young people, Vietnamese people, poor people—some dead, some only bashed up for the moment. There were always more of them to replace the fallen and join them the next night. Then came the period when people we knew—not knew personally, but knew of—started falling to the ground: Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy. Was that more alarming? Lisa said it was natural. “They gotta kill them,” she explained. “Otherwise it’ll never settle down.”

Is this the type of friend or lover I want to have? I ask myself every time I meet someone new. Charming but shallow; good-hearted but a bit conventional; too handsome for his own good; fascinating but probably unreliable; and so forth. I guess I've had my share of unreliable. More than my share? How many would constitute more than my share?

A representative conversation with Dr. Wick: “Good morning. It has been decided that you were compulsively promiscuous. Would you like to tell me about that?” “No.” This is the best of several bad responses, I’ve decided. “For instance, the attachment to your high school English teacher.” Dr. Wick always uses words like attachment. “Uh?” “Would you like to tell me about that?” “Um. Well. He drove me to New York.” That was when I realized he was interested. He brought along a wonderful vegetarian lunch for me. “But that wasn’t when it was.” “What? When what was?” “When we fucked.” (Flush.) “Go on.” “We went to the Frick. I’d never been there. There was this Vermeer, see, this amazing painting of a girl having a music lesson—I just couldn’t believe how amazing it was—” “So when did you—ah—when was it?” Doesn’t she want to hear about the Vermeer? That’s what I remember. “What?” “The—ah—attachment. How did it start?” “Oh, later, back home.” Suddenly I know what she wants. “I was at his house. We had poetry meetings at his house. And everybody had left, so we were just sitting there on the sofa alone. And he said, ‘Do you want to fuck?’ ” (Flush.) “He used that word?” “Yup.” He didn’t. He kissed me. And he’d kissed me in New York too. But why should I disappoint her? This was called therapy.

Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside.

“A writer,” I said, when my social worker asked me what I planned to do when I got out of the hospital. “I’m going to be a writer.” “That’s a nice hobby, but how are you going to earn a living?” My social worker and I did not like each other. I didn’t like her because she didn’t understand that this was me, and I was going to be a writer; I was not going to type term bills or sell au gratin bowls or do any other stupid things.

It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather.

But most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?

My classmates were spinning their fantasies for the future: lawyer, ethnobotanist, Buddhist monk (it was a very progressive high school). Even the dumb, uninteresting ones who were there to provide “balance” looked forward to their marriages and their children. I knew I wasn’t going to have any of this because I knew I didn’t want it. But did that mean I would have nothing? I was the first person in the history of the school not to go to college.

One of my teachers told me I was a nihilist. He meant it as an insult but I took it as a compliment.

My self-image was not unstable. I saw myself, quite correctly, as unfit for the educational and social systems.

People ask, How did you get in there? 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.