Most of us saw our therapists every day. Cynthia didn’t; she had therapy twice a week and shock therapy once a week. And Lisa didn’t go to therapy. S… - Susanna Kaysen

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.”

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. 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.