Girl Interrupted at Her Music (painting by Vermeer) Symbol Analysis

Kaysen titled her memoir after a famous baroque painting by Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, Girl Interrupted at Her Music. The painting, produced in the late 1650s, depicts a young woman interrupted by an older gentleman while studying music. In the book’s final pages, Kaysen and her boyfriend visit the Frick museum in New York City. When Kaysen encounters the painting for the first time since her last visit sixteen years earlier, she sees herself reflected in the girl’s expression, as the girl in the painting seems to be “look[ing] out for someone who would see her.” Kaysen becomes deeply emotional, feeling that her own life was “interrupted in the music of being seventeen.” The idea that Susanna’s life was unjustly interrupted by her committal to the McLean hospital haunts her, and as she stands in the Frick weeping before the painting of the titular “girl interrupted,” she is able to begin the process of grieving for the time she lost, putting an end to the interruption once and for all. Thus, she moves into her future with a framework for understanding and talking about what happened to her in her youth.