Girl, Interrupted
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50 free Girl, Interrupted trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Girl, Interrupted began as a slim memoir about the months a teenage Susanna Kaysen spent on a locked psychiatric ward in the late 1960s, and became a 1999 film that turned a ward full of young actresses into stars. Both versions ask the same uncomfortable question: who gets to decide what counts as crazy? This quiz covers the film from Susanna's arrival at Claymoore to her final showdown with Lisa, along with the cast, the awards and the casting stories from behind the camera. It also goes back to the book: the patients Kaysen describes, the details the screen version changed, and the real hospital and its famous former residents. It is written for fans rewatching the film, for students who have just finished the memoir and want to check their reading, and for anyone who likes film trivia with a true story behind it.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who won an Academy Award for playing the rebellious patient Lisa Rowe in Girl, Interrupted?
Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie also took the Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards for the part, sweeping the season. Time Out's reviewer wrote that the film wilts a little whenever she is off screen.
Q 02The title of Susanna Kaysen's memoir Girl, Interrupted comes from a painting by which Dutch master?
Johannes Vermeer
Johannes Vermeer painted Girl Interrupted at Her Music, and Kaysen draws a parallel between the girl's broken-off lesson and her own interrupted youth.
Q 03Which poet was a patient, years before Susanna Kaysen, at the real hospital in Girl, Interrupted?
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath drew on her stay for The Bell Jar, her only novel, which first appeared under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.
Q 04In Girl, Interrupted, Susanna's boyfriend Toby has just been drafted to serve in which war?
Vietnam War
Vietnam War call-ups shadow the story's late-1960s setting, and Toby turns up at the hospital with a plan to dodge his.
Q 05In Girl, Interrupted, Daisy Randone hides the carcasses of which food, brought to her by her father?
Chicken
Chicken is all Daisy will eat, and only alone in her room. In Kaysen's memoir she says it will be time to go home once she has collected 14 carcasses.
Q 06Which future star of Mad Men and The Handmaid's Tale plays burn victim Polly in Girl, Interrupted?
Elisabeth Moss
Elisabeth Moss had been a child actress since the early 1990s. Peggy Olson and June Osborne came years after her turn as the childlike Polly.
Q 07In Girl, Interrupted, Susanna lands in Claymoore after taking a bottle of which pills with alcohol?
Aspirin
Aspirin washed down with alcohol is the overdose that starts the story, though Susanna denies to the psychiatrist that she meant to die.
Q 08Critics measured Girl, Interrupted against which 1970s Oscar winner, with one calling it a knockoff?
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was the yardstick in the Los Angeles Times, where Kenneth Turan accused the script of manufacturing obvious, standard-issue drama.
Q 09Which actress plays Valerie, the stern but caring head nurse at Claymoore, in Girl, Interrupted?
Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg came to the part with an Oscar for Ghost behind her, and as the voice of the hyena Shenzi in The Lion King.
Q 10Who directed Girl, Interrupted before going on to make Walk the Line, Logan and Ford v Ferrari?
James Mangold
James Mangold also co-wrote the script, and the film's star recruited him after seeing his debut feature, Heavy.
Q 11Which actress, also an executive producer of the film, plays Susanna Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted?
Winona Ryder
Winona Ryder had tried to buy the memoir's film rights herself, then spent five years steering the project through three rejected scripts.
Q 12In Girl, Interrupted, which diagnosis does Dr. Potts at first keep secret from Susanna herself?
Borderline personality disorder
Borderline personality disorder is the label in Susanna's file, and Kaysen's memoir picks apart its textbook definition as a generalization.
Q 13In Girl, Interrupted, Lisa Rowe has spent eight years in and out of Claymoore under which diagnosis?
Sociopath
Q 21Which actor is the father of the Girl, Interrupted star who won an Oscar as Lisa Rowe?
Jon Voight
Jon Voight won Best Actor for Coming Home, so his daughter's win made them only the second father and daughter to both hold acting Oscars.
Q 22Which actor plays Toby, the boyfriend who visits Susanna at Claymoore, in Girl, Interrupted?
Jared Leto
Jared Leto began on TV's My So-Called Life and is also the frontman of the rock band Thirty Seconds to Mars.
Q 23Which British acting great plays Dr. Wick, the hospital's head psychologist, in Girl, Interrupted?
Vanessa Redgrave
Vanessa Redgrave, an Oscar winner for Julia, appears so briefly that a New York Daily News critic said the role bordered on a cameo.
Sociopath is a label Lisa seems to take some pride in. In the memoir she is plainly annoyed when a second patient arrives with the same one.
Q 14In Girl, Interrupted, where does the newly drafted Toby beg Susanna to run away with him?
Canada
Canada is his way out, but Susanna turns him down, telling him she has friends among the patients now.
Q 15Which Clueless actress plays the fragile patient Daisy Randone in Girl, Interrupted?
Brittany Murphy
Brittany Murphy took the role after the actress first signed for it dropped out weeks before filming, and it earned her a Young Artist Award nomination.
Q 16What nickname do the Claymoore patients give the burn victim Polly Clark in Girl, Interrupted?
Torch
Torch is the ward's blunt name for the childlike Polly. In the memoir, where she set herself alight, the others respect her courage too much to ask why.
Q 17Which Petula Clark hit do Susanna and Lisa sing to comfort Polly in Girl, Interrupted?
Downtown
Downtown is sung by the two actresses in character, after the pair sedate the night nurse to reach Polly in isolation.
Q 18In Girl, Interrupted, which hidden part of Claymoore do Lisa and the other patients roam at night?
The tunnels
The tunnels run underground beneath the hospital, and Lisa later chases Susanna through them in the film's climactic confrontation.
Q 19In Girl, Interrupted, what does Lisa steal from Susanna and read aloud to turn the others against her?
Her diary
Her diary holds blunt notes on the other patients, and before leaving Susanna apologizes to Georgina and Polly for what she wrote about them.
Q 20In Girl, Interrupted, where does Lisa flee after she and Susanna find Daisy dead?
Florida
Florida is where Lisa runs after searching Daisy's room for cash, while a horrified Susanna calls an ambulance and goes back to the hospital.
Q 24In Girl, Interrupted, where is Susanna publicly confronted by the wife of a man she had an affair with?
An ice cream parlor
An ice cream parlor is the scene, on a rare supervised outing, and Lisa leaps to Susanna's defense by loudly insulting the woman.
Q 25In Girl, Interrupted, the reclusive patient Daisy Randone is addicted to which drugstore remedy?
Laxatives
Laxatives are Daisy's habit. In the memoir Lisa gets into her room and reports back that she only needs them because of her strange diet.
Q 26What does Susanna take from Daisy's apartment before returning to Claymoore in Girl, Interrupted?
Her kitten
Her kitten leaves with Susanna, who has just called an ambulance and realized she never wants to become like Lisa.
Q 27In Girl, Interrupted, which drug do the runaways Lisa and Susanna trade Daisy for a bed for the night?
Valium
Valium buys the pair one night in the apartment that Daisy's father has rented for her after her discharge.
Q 28In Girl, Interrupted, what is done to Lisa as punishment after the night nurse is found sedated?
Electroconvulsive therapy
Electroconvulsive therapy is followed by solitary confinement, which Lisa breaks out of that same night to run away.
Q 29In the film Girl, Interrupted, what is Susanna's roommate Georgina Tuskin said to be?
A pathological liar
A pathological liar is the film's Georgina, who spins a false story about Polly's burns. In the memoir her diagnosis is schizophrenia instead.
Q 30Girl, Interrupted, set in New England, shot its Claymoore scenes at a real state hospital in which US state?
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania supplied Harrisburg State Hospital, an asylum founded after lobbying by the reformer Dorothea Dix, which stood in for the Massachusetts hospital of the memoir.