Girl, Interrupted MVP - The Vermeer

Life Interrupted

My MVP just may have come to me before I even opened the book.  It’s all in the title – Girl, Interrupted.  We all can sense how Susanna’s life was “interrupted” by her illness.  I mean, she was a energetic and talented young woman.  She must have been pretty.  The boys liked her, and so did the men.  For a teenager in her position, it must have been the saddest and loneliest taxi ride to McLean Hospital.   She was giving up the best years of her life, and she knew she wasn’t going to get them back.

But that “Girl, Interrupted” is not the most valuable part.  For me, it was the trip to the Frick Museum with her English teacher  to see the Vermeer paintings.  Of course, that scene made me nervous.  It made her nervous.  We both knew that something sick was about to happen. There she was, waiting for her English teacher to stop and kiss her.  It wasn’t if he was going to do it; it was when he was going to do it.  In anticipation,   she found herself escaping down a corridor when she  stops suddenly in front of “Girl, Interrupted At Her Music” by the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer.   The painting was of a young girl turning her face away from her music teacher.

It seemed to me that this was an important – if not mystical -  moment in Susanna’s life. As she stood there it was like the girl in the painting was speaking directly to her. “I looked into her brown eyes and I recoiled,” says Susanna.  “She was warning me of something – she looked up to warn me. Her mouth was slightly open, as if she had just drawn a breath in order to say to me, ‘Don’t!’ (166).  Oh man, I wanted to say the same thing, but how is an inexperienced 17-year-old to know of the implications?

Susanna must have regarded this experience so meaningful  that she returned to the scene 16 years later and wrote about it again:  It’s the second time around when Susanna shows real understanding for the way the world works.   She detects the sadness in the young girl’s eyes.  The music teacher is right on top of her, telling her something like, “This is the way it has to be…”  Susanna knows what the music student feels inside.  For Susanna, it wasn’t a momentary interruption; it would be a lifetime of sadness.

How many of us can recall those life-changing, self-discovery moments?  Could we write about them like Susanna did?  What she saw in the young girl’s eyes, that’s my MVP.