Finding My Mother—and Me—in the Women of ‘Girl, Interrupted’

Living with mental illness is a constant cycle of wellness and illness, and each recovery is impermanent.

I used to see my dead mother everywhere. I’d catch her ghost in store windows, or reflected in car windshields. In the morning, I used to spot her in the bathroom mirror for just a second before her face melted away into my own. I killed my doppelganger when I dyed my hair from the bottle-blond my mother preferred to a brown that’s closer to my (our) natural color. Family friends finally stopped whispering to each other that I looked so much like Jill.

When I was ten, a couple of years before she died of complications from the medication she took to handle her borderline personality disorder, my mother tried to explain why she behaved the way she did; why she skipped family holidays to go on thousand-dollar shopping sprees, starved herself during the week and only ate on Sundays, took a razor blade to her legs at night and left bloodstains on the carpet for my grandmother and me to scrub out the next morning.

She didn’t know how to say she was sorry or that she knew she was a bad parent, so instead she handed me stacks of books about her personality disorder and a VHS copy of the 1999 drama Girl, Interrupted, which had been released the previous year.

In the film, Winona Ryder plays Susanna Kaysen, a young woman just graduated from high school who checks into a psychiatric hospital at the behest of her parents following a suicide attempt, though she initially denies her intent was to kill herself. In the ward, Susanna meets Lisa Rowe, a charming and manipulative sociopath played by Angelina Jolie. Lisa distrusts the mental health industry, claiming that society is to blame for its reluctance to accept the women in the ward for who they are. She bullies Susanna and the other patients into breaking hospital rules and resisting treatment.

Susanna and Lisa are situated in such direct opposition to one another that, as a child, I knew I was supposed to identify with Susanna, the good girl who wants to get better and must resist the alluring pull of antagonist Lisa. Looking back, I see the irony of black-and-white characters in a film about borderline personality disorder, a condition characterized by splitting, or the inability to consistently recognize the self and others as complex beings with both good and bad qualities.

I sat cross-legged on my bed with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders across my knees and Girl, Interrupted playing on the TV. With a pencil, I underlined the criteria that applied to my mother: self-harm, unstable relationships, identity disturbances, fear of abandonment, severe dissociative symptoms. I looked for those criteria, for my mother, as I watched Susanna Kaysen overcome her symptoms, leave the psychiatric ward, and return to her life outside.

The boundary between health and illness is delineated in the film, and we are supposed to celebrate Susanna as she gets in the taxi to rejoin society as a newly “sane” person. And as a ten-year-old, that’s how I saw it: a story about a woman who conquers mental illness and is rewarded with a normal life. When the movie ended, I rewound the tape and put it back into my VCR to watch again, searching for evidence I could use to solve the problems of my mother’s psyche. I memorized the film like it was a how-to guide for repairing my mother.

Unlike Susanna, my mother never got better. In retrospect, it was impossible to expect her to recover from a chronic condition. She died alone in her boyfriend’s trailer, seizing on the floor. At home in bed, I woke up half an hour before I overheard my grandmother receive the phone call. Sometimes, I think it was my mother’s spirit that woke me up to bear witness to her death, and I wonder why she couldn’t just let me sleep through it.

*

When my mother died, I was sad, but grateful that my childhood might finally be manageable without her in it. I thought she would no longer hold an influence over my life, but she resurfaces in parts of me. Because of its similar diagnostic criteria, borderline personality disorder is often confused with my own condition, bipolar disorder.

Like my mother, I experience intoxicating highs and devastating lows, issues with impulse control, and psychotic symptoms like paranoia and other delusions, just on a much smaller scale. Unlike my mother, I’ve been able to cope without medication for the past several years, managing my illness with a cocktail of mindfulness, ketogenic diet, exercise, supplements, journaling, crying, and whatever else I need to get through the day.

But as my symptoms intensify, I know there will come a time when I’ll have to go back on medication. My symptoms are shifting as I age. I’m losing sight of borders no matter how desperately I try to seek them, the division between my personality and my symptoms, the line where my mother ends and where I begin. The more intense my symptoms are, the more the boundary between my mother and myself feels permeable. I worry that if I can’t separate myself from my mother, then I will end up sharing her fate.

I worry that if I can’t separate myself from my mother, then I will end up sharing her fate.

2019 marks the sixteenth anniversary of my mother’s death and the twentieth anniversary of Girl, Interrupted’s release. I am twenty-eight when I rewatch the film, coming down off a particularly bad manic episode. Though I’ve seen the film dozens of times, this is the first viewing where I am searching for both myself and my mother on the screen. I see the dynamic between Susanna and Lisa differently than I interpreted it when I was ten. The separation between the characters is fuzzier than I remember. Both characters express kindness and cruelty in equal parts, and both are alternately vulnerable and manipulative. I watch and I don’t know which is the villain and which is the hero; which is me, which is my mother.

In a scene where Susanna’s therapist Melvin, played by Jeffrey Tambor, is conducting a group session with her and her parents, Susanna’s father unwittingly reveals his daughter’s borderline diagnosis, a detail that Melvin had shared with him over the phone. Immediately, Susanna frantically demands a definition for her condition. Though she desperately wants the security of a fixed, exact meaning, borderline personality has a complicated and varied list of criteria, so much so that its categorization as a single disorder has been heavily contested for decades.

“Borderline between what and what?” she asks, distressed. Her voice climbs in volume and pitch. Susanna’s agitation is familiar, because I too become fixated on labeling things.

If I can separate the parts of my life into categories, I think, I can finally make sense of the world. But searching for clear, impenetrable boundaries is futile, I know, because those sorts of boundaries rarely exist.

Melvin can’t or won’t explain Susanna’s disorder, apart from telling her that it’s “not uncommon,” particularly among young women—a three to one ratio, in fact. The camera zooms in on Susanna’s intense, dark eyes. She searches for the imaginary border that her diagnosis suggests bars her from a stable existence. I imagine Susanna standing in the middle of a river, caught between two banks, each of them equally unreachable. When I look again, it’s not Susanna but my mother. I look a third time, and the woman in the river is me.

Like my mother, I exist in extremes. When I’m manic, I can’t sleep. I’m on fire with ambition and anger and joy. I make lists and start dozens of projects. I can see the future. I become my own oracle, and nothing is more beautiful and perfect than the certainty that vibrates through my entire being. But the mania doesn’t last. When it subsides, despair consumes my body and I’m unable to get out of bed for anything other than the obligations I can’t avoid.

Susanna is tentative about accepting that there is, according to the hospital staff, only one path to wellness. She tells Dr. Wick that her favorite word is ambivalent, misinterpreting its definition for apathy. Dr. Wick corrects her by showing Susanna the dictionary entry and defines ambivalent as exhibiting strong feelings in two opposing directions simultaneously, the implication being that Susanna is driving herself mad by attempting to occupy multiple identities at the same time, thereby resisting the binary imposed on her.

“Am I sane?” Dr. Wick asks of Susanna. “Or am I crazy?”

The word ambivalent meant nothing to me when I was ten, but it means everything to me now as an adult who regularly slips between extremes and holds conflicting desires. Because I am my mother and she is me, I have to assume she felt similarly, and that she wanted to stay and to run away, to help and to hurt at the same time.

Because I am my mother and she is me, I have to assume she felt similarly, and that she wanted to stay and to run away, to help and to hurt at the same time.

My mother was a chaotic presence, equal parts affection and resentment. Being around her required that I occupy multiple roles simultaneously. Once, my grandmother, our primary caregiver, left my younger brother in my mother’s care one evening to take me to my fifth-grade basketball game. My mother had shown improvement, keeping up with therapy and holding down a job. She lived at home with us in the downstairs part of the house while my grandmother, my brother, and I lived upstairs.

When my grandmother and I came home from the game, we found my mother smashed from mixing her medication with vodka. She reeled, falling into the piano and pounding out a dissonant melody each time her body hit the keys. My five-year-old brother laughed at the funny way our mother walked and how she slurred into the cordless phone pressed to her ear.

I took the phone from her and told the man on the other end that my mother couldn’t talk right now.

“No, don’t hang up!” my mother shrieked. She panicked at the thought of the man abandoning her. “Stay on the line. Just say blah, blah, blah.”

It’s possible to be a child and a parent at the same time. I put the phone to my ear and sobbed, “Blah, blah, blah” to the dial tone.

It’s possible to be weak and strong at the same time. I took my mother’s arm and guided her while my grandmother followed behind, wringing her hands and whimpering. My mother stumbled, and I caught her, both of us slamming into the wall. Her chin banged the top of my skull. I shifted the bulk of her weight onto my shoulders and shuffled my feet, slowly dragging her to bed. I suspected she made her body heavier to test how much I was willing to do to prove that I loved her.

It’s possible to love someone and to hate them at the same time.

The conclusion to Girl, Interrupted is framed as a success. The struggle is over, and Susanna leaves the hospital in a taxi, eager to rejoin the healthy people on the outside. The filter is brighter to illustrate that Susanna is now “healed.” Through voiceover, she proudly tells the viewer that her medical file now defines her as a recovered borderline.

Watching the film as an adult, though, I know that the road to healing is not a straight line, and it does not end in being “cured.” Instead, living with mental illness is a constant cycle of wellness and illness, and each recovery is impermanent.

“Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret,” Susanna’s voice declares. “It’s you or me, amplified.”

The film is not a step-by-step guide like I wanted it to be when I was a girl. Instead, it’s a fantasy where health and illness are clearly demarcated and falsely moralized, and the heroine conquers her demons once and for all simply by harnessing her willpower. It’s an inspiring narrative, but I don’t believe it. And I wonder if it does more harm than good for those struggling with mental illness; if, by chasing that impossible outcome, we’re discouraging ourselves from making progress that’s realistic, albeit imperfect.

Though Girl, Interrupted emphasizes a strict dichotomy between sickness and health, I know it’s possible to have multiple and conflicting identities at once. I am healthy and mentally ill simultaneously. And I know it’s possible to hold a wealth of contradicting emotions inside me, too.

I’m both heartbroken and relieved that my mother is dead, and I feel both guilty and justified for having those feelings. I love her. I hate her. I miss her. I don’t want her back. I wish she was here.