Elizabeth Wurtzel never jumped through all the Westminster-style hoops the literary world loves to lay out and provided a kick in the dutiful nuts to the literary Establishment
American writer Elizabeth Wurtzel holds up a locket with the word “Prozac” on it, posing in front of a window display of a hand holding pills on August 14, 1991 in New York City. Photo: Catherine McGann/Getty Images Prozac Nation was, to 16-year-old me, a book to be read sneakily. I’d discovered it tossed on my older sister’s bed and read it in chunks, tucked away in a corner of my room.
When Wurtzel died of metastatic breast cancer this week at the far, far too young age of 52, it was that unabashed, straightforward garden hosing of emotion that she was predominantly publicly remembered and loved for. That direct spray, her refusal to couch her neediness, her extravagance, her narcissism, her belief that her life before age 35 warranted not one but two memoirs, was also the reason she’d never morphed from unruly outsider into some middle-aged stateswoman of letters.
While it circulated like mad , some critics, perhaps more than a little blinded by Wurtzel’s age, candor, and, let’s be honest, her gender, saw it as nothing more than a nearly 400-page whine. In a fit of cravat-clutching for the New York Times, Ken Tucker practically patted the book on the head and sent it back to bed with a cup of milk.
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