The main theme of this paper is the way in which the experience of mental illness is shaped inside a literary form of a memoir. Illness experience is one of medical anthropology's central concepts and is used to gain insight into social, cultural, symbolic and personal aspects of health and illness as universal human notions. In this respect, mental disorders represent an especially problematic area given the fact that, for instance, the very distinction between mental and physical health or illness does not appear across all cultures. Although the Western medicine has developed a highly elaborated and rationalized system of classification of mental illnesses, they remain filled with cultural meaning and social norms reflected in diagnostic criteria, social perception of the patient and the patient's own process of creating meaning. This dinamic and often conflicting relationship between mental disorder as a lived experience and as a psychiatric concept (tied to the biomedical model of human body and mind) becomes evident in Susanne Kaysen's book Girl, Interruped where she speaks about her experiences of psychiatric hospitalization and the treatment of her borderline personality disorder. We approach this work of literature by combining the theoretic framework of anthropology of experience with the narrative approach to illness experience. This also leads us to question the realationship between anthropology and literature, that is, between ethnographers and literary authors. This paper points to the significance of narrative esthetization and representation of a problematic field of human experience that is mental illness. Therefore, the interpretation will be focused on themes, metaphors, motives and characters used by the author in order to meaningfully shape her traumatic experience and counter dominant interpretations of female normality and mental health.