Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of “Prozac Nation,” died Tuesday in Manhattan at age 52 after a long battle with breast cancer, according to reports.
Wurtzel — who rose to stardom with the breakout 1994 memoir detailing her battle with depression and drug addiction — was diagnosed with the disease in 2015 and underwent a double mastectomy, her husband Jim Freed told The Washington Post.
The cancer spread to her brain, Freed said.
The author’s immediate cause of death was “complications from leptomeningeal disease,” an illness that occurs when cancer spreads to the cerebrospinal fluid, the outlet reported.
Despite her struggle with the disease, Wurtzel once wrote that her cancer diagnosis was “nothing” compared to what she had already experienced battling mental illness and addiction as a Harvard University undergrad and a struggling writer in her 20s.
“And everyone cares! People love cancer! … Everyone wants to help. Everyone wants you to talk to their second cousin, the radiation oncologist in Boise. Cancer is popular. I had no idea,” Wurtzel wrote in a 2015 Vice article.
“What is what’s ahead of me compared with what’s behind me? It is all nothing. I am 47 years old and quite a lot has happened. This is one more thing. It is another crucible. It is another hoop to jump through.”
Wurtzel’s book debut in the early 1990s quickly earned her a strong reputation. A derisive New York Times book review labeled her “A Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna” and her alma mater’s newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, slammed the novel as “more useful as an object lesson in how much the New York publishing industry sucks.”
Despite the criticism, Wurtzel’s prose was credited, in part, with reinvigorating the memoir genre and immediately drew parallels to William Styron’s “Darkness Visible” and Susanna Kaysen’s “Girl, Interrupted.”
The memoir, filled with colorful anecdotes describing her penchant for oral sex, cutting the inside of her legs with razors and a suicide attempt, quickly rose to the Time’s best sellers list and was even adapted into a Miramax film starring Christina Ricci in 2005.
Wurtzel would go on to publish two more books before the age of 35 — a second memoir in 2002 called “More, Now, Again” that told of drug abuse that brought multiple stints in rehab and an essay collection titled “Bitch” in 1998.
In her later years, she became a lawyer after studying alongside investigative journalist Ronan Farrow at Yale University and married Freed, an author and photo editor for the Daily Mail.
Farrow and his mother, Mia Farrow, both took to Twitter to remember Wurtzel, referring to her by her nickname “Lizzie.”
“I met Lizzie in law school. She started mid-career as I was starting young. We were both misfits and she was kind and generous and filled spaces that might have otherwise been lonely with her warmth and humor and idiosyncratic voice. She gave a lot to a lot of us. I miss her,” Ronan Farrow wrote.
Mia Farrow tweeted, “This is so very sad. Lizzy was a classmate of Ronan at Yale Law- and soon became a friend to our family. She was brilliant, complex, fascinating, fun and kind.”
Fans of Wurtzel remembered her poignant writing and the impact she had on the modern literary world.
“Upon hearing of the incredibly-too-soon death of Elizabeth Wurtzel, I’m reminded of this sentence that just gets me: ‘I wanted to love and be loved, but I behaved badly, and I had terrible taste.’” Julie Garcia wrote, linking to a 2014 article Wurtzel wrote in the New York Times.
Writer Erin Blakemore added, “It’s impossible to convey the impact Elizabeth Wurtzel had in the ’90s. She was unapologetic, raw, honest. She stood for a very specific form of GenX femininity, confession, rage.”
“We learned from her—and from how intensely she was mocked for writing about her own life.”