Susanna Kaysen once said that what inspired her to write Girl, Interrupted was ‘rage and a desire to dissect this world.’ The book, about her stay in a mental hospital in the 1960s, was not a traditional misery memoir of personal confession, it was postmodern and episodic, full of silences and omissions – an ‘artefact’ rather than a transcription of reality.

The filmed version abandoned this structure for a more traditional narrative arc, so much so that Kaysen said she felt like she ‘didn’t even write this book’. Despite its deviation from the source material, the film’s central performances from Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie still encapsulated the madness and despair of the book. The excellent soundtrack used sixties pop songs with sweetly miserable lyrics like ‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark and in one shocking and brutal sequence ‘The End of the World’ by Skeeter Davis.

A few years ago plans were made to write a Girl, Interrupted stage musical and singer songwriter Aimee Mann was enlisted to compose the music. The project is much delayed and may never see the light of day, so Mann decided to release the songs separately as a full album.

‘Queens of the Summer Hotel’ uses the original elliptical nature of the book’s structure and successfully captures the true essence of the source material in beautiful songs of despair, dark humour and quiet hope. Continue reading “Album Review – Aimee Mann – Queens Of the Summer Hotel” →