Elizabeth Wurtzel

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Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel (born July 31, 1967 in New York City) is an American writer and journalist famous for her work in the confessional memoir genre. The Village Voice has called her "a powerful creative genius, a modern-day Plath or Anne Sexton"[1]

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[edit] Background

Brought up Jewish, Wurtzel's parents divorced when she was young. As described in Prozac Nation, Wurtzel's depression began at the ages of ten to twelve. She attended Ramaz for high school and was described as an over-achiever by her teachers, who expected her to become a nationally famous writer. While an undergraduate at Harvard College, she wrote for The Harvard Crimson and the Dallas Morning News. Wurtzel also received the 1986 Rolling Stone Magazine College Journalism Award. Following her graduation, Wurtzel moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and found work as pop music critic for The New Yorker and New York Magazine.

[edit] Prozac Nation

Wurtzel is best known for publishing her groundbreaking memoir, the best-selling Prozac Nation, at the age of 26. The book chronicles her battle with depression while being a college undergraduate and how she was eventually rescued by Prozac after multiple attempts at treatment and suicide attempts. The film adaptation of Prozac Nation, starring Christina Ricci, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival September 8, 2001 but never had a U.S. theatrical release. It was telecast on the Starz! network during March, 2005 and was released on DVD in the summer of 2005.

[edit] After Prozac Nation

Following the critical acclaim and bestselling success of Prozac Nation, Wurtzel moved to Florida as she felt she was no longer able to concentrate on her work in New York City and began writing her second book, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. It was at this point that she battled abuse and addiction to Ritalin. Prior to moving to Florida, Wurtzel had battled cocaine and heroin addictions as well. Wurtzel wrote Bitch as she felt that feminist writing had become "dry" and she wanted to make it "juicy" again. She focused on societal definitions of "bad girls" and analyzed female public figures from Amy Fisher to Hillary Clinton through this lens. Wurtzel, at this point a drug addict, gained much weight due to the medication she was taking and was seen in discomfort whilst promoting Bitch on numerous media channels such as CNN. Multiple book readings and press interviews also had to be cancelled. During this time, her regular column in The Guardian was cancelled because of her inability to produce work on time.

It was these experiences that led to her publishing a second autobiographic volume, titled More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction (2001). This book was centered around her addiction to the prescription medication Ritalin while writing Bitch.

Wurtzel has also worked for Nerve as a film critic. As of 2005, she is studying at Yale Law School.

[edit] Controversy

Controversy erupted over comments that Wurtzel, who lived near the World Trade Center in New York, made about the September 11, 2001 attacks, during an interview with Jan Wong about the Prozac Nation sequel, More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction. She was quoted in a February 16, 2002, article by Wong titled, "That's enough about me, now, what do you think of me?", for The Globe and Mail in Toronto:

My main thought was: What a pain in the ass... I had not the slightest emotional reaction. I thought, this is a really strange art project... It was a most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance. It fell like water. It just slid, like a turtleneck going over someone's head... It was just beautiful. You can't tell people this. I'm talking to you because you're Canadian... I just felt like everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me... I cried about all the animals left there in the neighbourhood... I think I have some kind of emotional block. I think I should join some support group for people who were there... You know what was really funny? After the fact, like, all these different writers were writing these things about what it was like, and nobody bothered to call me.

In some instances, those remarks were quoted out of context, not making it clear that Wurtzel lived near the WTC. In a previous interview (October, 2001), Wurtzel had stated:

I remember sitting in my apartment and when the first tower fell and the ground shook and one of my windows blew out and there was all this horrible gray and brown dust blowing into my apartment, and I was on the phone with my college roommate, who was calling from Washington basically to say, "Get out of your apartment. You just have to get out of your apartment." And I screamed really loud while I was on the phone with her and I just kept saying, "I'm going to die." And I later spoke to her and she said she's never heard me sound so afraid. And I think it was because for the first time in my life I felt like, you know, in actual danger... As of right now, all it is is one horrible, horrible day in the history of this city and this country. We don't know yet what else is gonna happen. But I do think people our age are pretty philosophical about this stuff. Maybe it's just a refusal to believe that anything terrible is going to happen. I mean, maybe that's my problem. Maybe that's what I sound like.[2]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0202,press,31332,10.html
  2. ^ "Analysis: Generation X may view September 11th events as a way to shape their generation"; Bob Edwards, Morning Edition (NPR), October 22, 2001

[edit] External links

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