Girl, Interrupted: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

In the “parallel world” which Susanna and her fellow patients inhabit, she says, things happen that had not yet happened in the world from which they all came. When they do finally happen in the “real world,” Susanna and the rest of the girls find them familiar, because similar things have already been “performed” in front of them. Susanna offers as an example of this phenomenon: “the story of Georgina’s boyfriend, Wade, and the sugar.”

Georgina and her boyfriend Wade met in the cafeteria, which the women’s ward and the men’s ward share. Wade is good-looking and full of rage. Georgina explains to the other girls that Wade’s father is a spy for the U.S., and Wade is angry that he will never be as tough as his father. One day, Susanna, suspicious of Wade, decides to try and find out more about Wade’s father. Wade tells Susanna that his father lives in Miami and knows who killed JFK. Susanna does not believe a single word out of Wade’s mouth—after all, Wade is in a psych ward, just like the rest of them, and often acts out so badly that he is restricted from visiting Georgina for weeks at a time. Wade speaks often of two of his father’s friends, Liddy and Hunt, and describes them as men who would “do anything,” but refuses to go further into specifics. Shortly after he tells Susanna this piece of information, Wade is locked up on his ward for bad behavior.

To comfort the distraught Georgina, who misses Wade badly, Susanna suggests redecorating their room or cooking something in the kitchen. Susanna and Georgina go to the kitchen to make caramels, but as Susanna lifts the pan of caramelized sugar off the stove, she spills its contents on Georgina’s hand, burning her. While nurses rush to attend to Georgina, Georgina does nothing—she just stands still and stares at her “candied” hand.

Susanna writes that later, during the Watergate hearings, a man—she can’t remember if it was E. Howard Hunt or G. Gordon Liddy—said that, every night, he held his hand in a candle flame to reassure himself of the fact that he could stand up to torture if push came to shove. Susanna imagines that after the sugar incident, Georgina’s nurse surely wrote in Georgina’s file that Georgina “lacked affect after [her] accident,” while Wade’s surely wrote in his that he was continuing with a “fantasy that [his] father is [a] CIA operative with dangerous friends.”