In Memoriam

Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Unfinished Work

To be in a room with Wurtzel was to fall in thrall to her, writes novelist Emily Gould.

January 8, 2020

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She was still living in the apartment on 11th Street the first time I met her, on the ground floor of a brownstone building whose double doors opened up like a vortex and sucked me in. Time lost its meaning, though it was early in the day when I arrived. At one point we went out for coffee, and later we opened a bottle of wine and ordered food. I could have stayed for days; she would never have kicked me out.

It was a very specific kind of apartment, the kind where everywhere your eye comes to rest there’s something that might be junk or might be important. Books lined all the walls and crowded every surface. Her dog, a trained therapy animal she began to take everywhere with her after 9/11, was never far from her side, and as she talked she stroked him absently. Her black cat, Arabella, wandered in and out of a back window, staring at us occasionally in a disconcertingly human way. For hours or minutes, we talked—well, mostly she talked, but it wasn’t a monologue. Truly self-centered people are boring, but Lizzie was never that; it was more that she found her own ideas and thoughts fascinating, and she was a natural raconteur so she could always make them fascinating to others. But she also asked questions and seemed interested in the answers. Arguing cost her nothing because she could always find a way to be right, and once you realized that every fight was a game to her, it became easy to play along. Her enormous eyes gleamed and her ring-laden hands moved gracefully through the air as she spoke. She burned brightly and I relaxed, stopped trying to make an impression, and absorbed her glow.

It was 2010, a weird time in my life, and I was open to falling in thrall to someone. Almost as soon as I arrived, I remember her showing me the inscription that David Foster Wallace had written to her in a copy of his first book. I don’t remember what it said, but I remember feeling intoxicatingly singled out, and also certain that she probably showed all her new acquaintances that same artifact.

But who knows, maybe I was special to her. She did seem to be interested in the ways we were alike. I had never known fame at the level she knew it, during the time when her name and face were shorthand for a kind of glamorous, Ophelia-like madness, but I had experienced what it was like to be a stand-in for a concept, as a writer and as a human being. I can’t express how much it helped me, over the course of the last decade, to get the perspective of someone who had survived that and gone on to do other things with her life and her writing. I felt lucky, I still feel lucky, to have been able to spend time in her presence.

Lizzie was so excited about her next book, which was to be a memoir of finding out the man she’d grown up thinking was her biological father actually wasn’t. I hope she got to write a lot of it before she died, and I hope to someday read it. It isn’t quite fathomable to me that Lizzie, with her enormous aliveness, is not still in the world.

Her writing is, at least. I hope that some who haven’t ever encountered it will read More, Now, Again, which is my favorite of her books; to me, it distills her essence— her funny combination of lightness and darkness, her insouciance in the face of her own mortality—to its purest essence. My favorite part is the passage about her habit of compulsively tweezing her leg hair while high on Ritalin. She was so forthright about human grossness, so simultaneously vain and devoid of vanity. Rereading it now is almost as good as listening to her speak, and it’s comforting until I realize that I will never get to hear her voice again.

Emily Gould

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