How Winona Ryder Took Girl, Interrupted From Page to Screen

[demmiblue]

Winona Ryder’s anxiety attacks were getting worse. She couldn’t sleep at night. She struggled to describe the anxiety attacks, even to the people closest to her, she told The New York Times. “My breathing would get labored, everything would start speeding up, and I’d get very scared,” she said. It was like the prickling shock of swerving out of the way of an oncoming car, a near miss that felt like it would never stop.

Then in the summer of 1993, soon after she’d broken up with Johnny Depp, Ryder said she “hit bottom,” falling into a deep depression that seemed without end. Desperate for relief, she checked herself into in-patient psychiatric care. While she was inside, all she wanted to do was sleep. She wanted help. She wanted answers. She wanted to stop feeling like she was selling her soul. But all she received was structure, four walls filled with the same unknowns.

“No matter how rich you are and how much you pay some hospital or doctor,” she said, “they can’t fix you. They can’t give you a pill or a secret answer to anything that’s going to make you all better.” Still without relief, Ryder left the hospital. Her stay had only lasted a few days, but in that time, she’d come to a familiar realization: she didn’t need to have all the answers. Learning to bend with life’s chaos was better than trying to understand it all.

“Life is just weird, and messy,” Ryder said. “And I just have to get through it, and do my best. Either choose to move on, or stay miserable. And I chose to move on.”

Soon afterward, her father, a rare-book dealer, gave her a galley of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted. Just like her father expected, Ryder saw herself in the story, especially in how Kaysen often found her own mental illness too amorphous to name. Ryder had never read a book like Girl, Interrupted before. It was funny, honest, sensitive. More importantly, it centered the experience of a teenage girl in a dark and insightful story.

https://lithub.com/how-winona-ryder-took-girl-interrupted-from-page-to-screen/

[Mike 03]

1. It's a great movie.

Instead of the recognizably vapid portrayal of women’s struggles he’d expected, Mangold took the film in the other direction. He said he added “grittiness,” but what he really did was take the book—and the women whose lives it represents—seriously.

That is what’s so visionary about the film and why we’re still struck by Ryder’s silent-movie-emotive performance today. We weren’t, and still aren’t, at a point where women speaking truth about girlhood in all its turmoil and rawness and hair and guts and dirt and anger and beauty—and being heard—is anything but revolutionary. To see ourselves, young and flawed as we are, is a grand coup.

[marble falls]

2. The article adds richness to the book and movie.