UK Edition
Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of ‘Prozac Nation’ hailed as a ‘heroine for the disaffected X-generation’ – obituary
Elizabeth Wurtzel, who has died of cancer aged 52, was a pioneer of the warts-and-all, lay-it-bare confessional; she shot to fame in 1994 with her bestselling memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, becoming the first among many to make a career out of her own misery.
In the book she recounted her self-destructive adventures with cocaine, unsuitable men and therapy during her teens and twenties which had led to a dependence on Prozac. The cover featured a fetching photograph of the 26-year-old author baring her midriff, while in Britain she publicised the book by doing topless shots for GQ magazine.
“The book is so naked, that me going naked makes it all go together more,” she explained in an interview with The Independent. “I think people should look at those pictures with the attitude: you get the book and the big tits, too.”
Despite the overheated prose – which, one critic suggested, would have made the book unpublishable were it written by a man or someone less good-looking – Prozac Nation soon rose up the bestseller lists.
The film rights were sold and the author was hailed as a “heroine for the disaffected X-generation”. The marketing worked so well that on the cover of her next book, a post-feminist polemic entitled Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1998), she appeared topless. “Feminist writing has become dry,” the author announced. “I want to make it wet again.”
Bitch and her subsequent memoir, More, Now, Again (2001), a series of essays featuring her new-found addictions to Ritalin and pornography (and passages about tweezering leg hairs, watching television, shoplifting, smuggling cocaine in her diaphragm, shrinks, rehab clinics, relationships with useless men, an abortion), received generally negative reviews.
Reviewing More, Now, Again in The Observer, Toby Young observed how “in spite of repeatedly claiming to be riddled with self-loathing, Wurtzel’s overweening self-regard oozes from every sentence.” Another critic expressed the hope that “somewhere along the white lines, Wurtzel will have discovered the maturity to get over herself … and write about something more important than Elizabeth Wurtzel.”
When Celia Walden interviewed her for the Telegraph in 2015, Elizabeth Wurtzel seemed to have done just that and found peace with a husband, the writer James Freed. She was even said to be planning to start a family. Her worst remaining vice, she claimed, was putting too much butter on her toast.
But by this time she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, the result of the BRCA genetic mutation, for which she underwent a double mastectomy and chemotherapy, an experience she described as “nothing” compared to everything else she had been through.
She became an advocate for BRCA testing and wrote about her experience in newspapers. But the cancer subsequently metastasised to her cerebrospinal fluid, a condition known as leptomeningeal disease.
An only child, Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel was born on July 31 1967 in Manhattan to Donald Wurtzel, an IBM middle manager, and Lynne, née Winters. Her parents split up in a messy divorce when Elizabeth was two and it was only when she was 50 that she learnt that Wurtzel was not her real father and that she was actually the product of an affair between her mother and the photographer Bob Adelman.
She often wrote about her difficult relationship with Wurtzel, recalling in Prozac Nation how she would try to prise his eyes open as he slept through her brief visits to see him, though she later conceded that she had expended “thousands of words on the wrong problem”.
While her parents continued to fight long-distance young Elizabeth devoted herself to her studies, writing a book about pets when she was six. Aged 11 she was sent away to summer camp, where she suffered her first bout of depression and took her first overdose. Her teenage years alternated between trips to the psychiatrist and summer camps as her parents searched for a cure to her depression.
She struggled on and got into Harvard, where she won the college journalism award but self-medicated with ecstasy and cocaine, before being given Prozac and lithium on prescription.
After graduation she went into journalism, eventually finding work as a music critic at The New Yorker and began working on a book about “being young and depressed in America”.
Soon after Prozac Nation was published, former colleagues dished the dirt on her in a long exposé in a Dallas newspaper. The story described how she had been fired as an intern from the Dallas Morning News for plagiarism, and how she had celebrated by having sex on a desk in the newsroom.
The attack caused Elizabeth Wurtzel to descend into deep depression and she reacted by topping up the prescription lithium, Prozac and Ritalin with copious amounts of heroin and methamphetamine.
She was still battling with depression when a film of Prozac Nation, starring Christina Ricci as the author, was premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8 2001.
Three days later, on September 11, Elizabeth Wurtzel was in her apartment in New York, close to the World Trade Centre, when the first plane hit the twin towers and her windows blew in. She subsequently gave an interview to a Canadian journalist in which she confessed that she had not experienced the “slightest” emotional reaction.
“My main thought was: what a pain in the ass,” she told him. “I felt everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me.”
Elizabeth Wurtzel’s husband survives her.
Elizabeth Wurtzel, born July 31 1967, died January 7 2020