Elizabeth Wurtzel: A Pioneer of Confessional Writing
1967-2020
On the afternoon I spent with Elizabeth Wurtzel, she was warm but ferociously intimidating. It was 1994, months before the release of Prozac Nation, the book that made her famous at age 27; I was a college senior and had found her name on a list at the alumni office. Less than a decade out of school, she had already written about pop music for New York Magazine and the New Yorker. I wondered if she could tell me about the writer’s life, and she offered to meet me in Manhattan.
As we bounced from stop to stop, I got a window into her peripatetic life; I recall an apartment filled with plants, a friend who worked for Time, breezy shop talk about the horrors of book deadlines, a sense that she had figured it all out. She didn’t share the details of her much wilder nights, but if I’m honest, she still probably wedged in my subconscious a sense that I was too cautious and bland to survive a writer’s life in New York. (I moved to New Orleans for a newspaper job instead, did mushrooms, etc., but eventually landed in the suburbs.)
Wurtzel, on the other hand, clearly thrived on the chaos of a cutthroat Manhattan existence—or rather, thrived and suffered through it simultaneously. It was her willingness to excavate that suffering that made her writing so consequential; she hadn’t figured out her life, after all, but she had figured out how to describe it with such intensity that you couldn’t look away. Prozac Nation, her memoir about youth and depression, cracked open the genre of confessional writing — and created an opening for a new generation to talk frankly about mental health.
Prozac Nation would have many imitators, and also many detractors, who tore into Wurtzel for self-indulgence even as they praised the power of her writing. (“Madness is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds,” she wrote in one passage. “That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.”) Some male reviewers were especially brutal: Walter Kirn in New York called the book “a work of singular self-absorption.” Michiko Kakutani was kinder in the New York Times: “One is less apt to remember Ms. Wurtzel’s self-important whining than her forthrightness, her humor and her ability to write sparkling, luminescent prose.”
The success of Prozac Nation brought Wurtzel more book deals, including Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1998), a meditation on a certain brand of feminist (the cover showed Wurtzel topless and raising a middle finger) and More, Now, Again (2002), a follow-up to Prozac Nation, describing more reckless behavior in the wake of her newfound fame. Wurtzel became known for self-destructiveness: There were more addictions, incendiary statements, a book deal that fell apart. She also sought order and other ways to channel her fierce intelligence, going to Yale Law School and working, for a time, for David Boies. (In 2015, she wrote a slender book about the law: Creatocracy: How the Constitution Invented Hollywood.) Still, misery remained her brand. In a 2013 essay in New York, she described a pervasive loneliness and a longing for a more conventional existence: “At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24.”
Wurtzel was often accused by critics of whining. But what she really did, again and again, was what we’re conditioned not to do: Answer the question “How are you?” with the actual truth. That commitment is even more striking today, in contrast with the curated happiness that’s forever on display on social media. For Wurtzel, a happy sheen wasn’t just boring, but cowardly. The brave thing was to know the worst things about your life, study them and describe them out loud.
She did the same when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, likely due to a BRCA genetic mutation she inherited from her biological father. (She had only recently realized that the man she had thought was her father was not, another way that chaos tunneled through her life.) A piece she wrote for Vice in February of that year was flip, assuming she had caught the disease early, so all would be well: “All my life, I had problems — galore! — with no answers. At long last, I find myself in trouble and there are solutions.” But that September, after the cancer had spread, she wrote a more pointed op-ed in the Times urging people to get the BRCA test, and insurance companies to cover it.
I read that piece this past January, after I learned that Wurtzel had died at 52. It so happened that, at the time, I had signed up for a study at a Boston hospital that included a free BRCA screening test. I had filled out surveys and paperwork, received a bar code to take to a lab, but couldn’t quite bring myself to get the blood drawn. The test could uncover a piece of self-knowledge that would throw my life into turmoil. It’s terrifying, sometimes, to know the truth.
But with Wurtzel’s death, I felt a sense of obligation — not just to myself and my family, but to her, in gratitude for a memorable day some 26 years earlier, and for the writing that would leave behind a record of her courage and her chutzpah. The test, it turned out, was negative. Knowing was a gift. Wurtzel, for all of her storied recklessness, had inspired me to do the responsible thing.