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It’s Kind of a Funny Story | Ned Vizzini

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Craig Gilner has found himself in an awkward place. After achieving his main goal of getting into Executive Pre-Professional High School, he no longer knows what to do with himself. School isn’t what he expected, his friends seem to populate a different world than he does, and nothing seems to interest him. Concluding he’s depressed, he begins a winding road to recovery, at first hopping from therapist to therapist, before finally happening upon one he likes.

Still, things seem unmanageable. At wits end, Craig eventually starts contemplating a flying leap off the Brooklyn Bridge. Luckily, he calls a suicide hotline instead. Living just a few blocks down from a Hospital, he follows the advice of the counselor on the line and walks down to the ER.

Through good intentions and a minor mis-comphrehension, Craig checks himself in, and becomes a Psychiatric Hospital Patient. He’s disinclined to stay, but they promptly show him the admittance sheet he had his mother sign only minutes before, and he settles down to make the best of it.

Along the way he learns quite a bit about himself, other people, and his so-called friends. He forms relationships, falls back into art, which he lost somewhere along the road of growing up. It takes him some time to realize it, even though it’s right in front of his face, but eventually he comes to understand that a large part of the issue is he hasn’t been on the road he really wanted.

While the subject is certainly not to be taken lightly, it is indeed, as it says, kind of a funny story.

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The It’s Kind of a Funny Story | Ned Vizzini by Jaemi, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 16th, 2006 at 2:09 pm by Jaemi and is filed under Book Review. Find similar posts by selecting and of the following tags: depression, mental illness, new york city, psychiatric hospitals, ya fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.