Elizabeth Wurtzel

Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel (July 31, 1967 – January 7, 2020) was an American writer, journalist, and lawyer known for the confessional memoir Prozac Nation, which she published at the age of 27.

Her work often focused on chronicling her personal struggles with depression, addiction, career, and relationships.

While an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1980s, Wurtzel wrote for The Harvard Crimson and received the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award for a piece about Lou Reed.

She also interned at The Dallas Morning News, but was fired after being accused of plagiarism.

She received a B.A. degree in comparative literature from Harvard in 1989.

Wurtzel subsequently moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and found work as a pop music critic for The New Yorker and New York Magazine.

The New York Times book critic Ken Tucker characterized her contributions to the former publication as "unintentionally hilarious."

Wurtzel's work drove a boom in confessional writing and the personal memoir genre during the 1990s, and she was viewed as a voice of Generation X.

In her later life, Wurtzel worked briefly as an attorney before her death from breast cancer.

Wurtzel grew up in a Jewish family on the Upper West Side of New York City and attended the Ramaz School.

Her parents, Lynne Winters and Donald Wurtzel, divorced when she was young, and Wurtzel was primarily raised by her mother, who worked in publishing and as a media consultant.

Wurtzel was best known for her best-selling memoir Prozac Nation (1994), published when she was 27.

The book chronicles her battle with depression as a college undergraduate and her eventual treatment with the medication Prozac.

Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times, "Wrenching and comical, self-indulgent and self-aware, Prozac Nation possesses the raw candor of Joan Didion's essays, the irritating emotional exhibitionism of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and the wry, dark humor of a Bob Dylan song."

The paperback was a New York Times bestseller.

In 1997 Dwight Garner wrote in Salon.com that her column "was so roundly despised that I sometimes felt like its only friend in the world."

Wurtzel's first book after Prozac Nation was titled Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1998).

The book earned a mixed review from Karen Lehrman in The New York Times; Lehrman wrote that while Bitch "is full of enormous contradictions, bizarre digressions and illogical outbursts, it is also one of the more honest, insightful and witty books on the subject of women to have come along in a while."

The film adaptation, which starred Christina Ricci, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2001.

More, Now, Again (2001), was the follow-up memoir to Prozac Nation and centered primarily on her addictions to cocaine and Ritalin.

The book discusses her drug induced obsession with tweezing as a form of self-harm, and recounts her behavior while writing Bitch, among other subjects.

It received generally negative reviews.

For Salon, Peter Kurth wrote that Wurtzel "imagines that every word she utters and every thought that pops into her head is fraught with meaning and portent. And still her new book goes nowhere."

He called the book "dysfunctional," characterized the author as an "overage adolescent," and concluded, "Sorry, Elizabeth. Wake up dead next time and you might have a book on your hands."

In The Guardian, Toby Young wrote that "Wurtzel's overweening self-regard oozes from every sentence" and concluded, "In a sense, More, Now, Again is the reductio ad absurdum of this whole self-obsessed genre: it's a confessional memoir by someone who has nothing to confess. Wurtzel has nothing to declare apart from her self-adoration. A better title for it would be Me, Myself, I."

"[W]hat a messy load it is," wrote Pace University professor Judith Schlesinger in The Baltimore Sun.

Schlesinger wrote that Wurtzel focused on "her contempt for other people—including her readers, who are expected to wade through her sloppy story, buy her shallow rationalizations, and tolerate her incessant tone of self-congratulation and entitlement."

While an intern at the Dallas Morning News, Wurtzel was fired, reportedly for plagiarism, although a 2002 The New York Times interview suggested that she had fabricated quotations in an article that was never published.

In 2004, Wurtzel applied to Yale Law School.

She later wrote that she never intended to pursue a career as a lawyer, but rather had simply wanted to attend law school.

She was accepted at Yale even though "Her combined LSAT score of 160 was, as she put it, 'adequately bad' ... 'Suffice it to say I was admitted for other reasons,' Wurtzel said. 'My books, my accomplishments.'" She was a summer associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr.

She received her J.D. in 2008, but failed the New York state bar exam on her first attempt.

The legal community criticized Wurtzel for holding herself out as a lawyer in interviews, because she was not licensed to practice law in any jurisdiction at the time.

Wurtzel passed the February 2010 New York State bar exam, and was employed full-time at Boies, Schiller & Flexner in New York City from 2008 to 2012.

She continued to work for the firm as a case manager and on special projects.

In July 2010, she wrote in the Brennan Center for Justice blog to make a proposal for the abolition of bar exams.

In a 2018 article in The Cut, Wurtzel wrote that she discovered in 2016 that her biological father was photographer Bob Adelman, who had worked with her mother in the 1960s.

As described in her memoir Prozac Nation, Wurtzel's depression began between the ages of 10 and 12.

Wurtzel admitted to cutting herself when she was in adolescence, and of spending her teenage years in an environment of emotional angst, substance misuse, bad relationships, and frequent fights with family members.

A gifted student with family wealth, Wurtzel went on to attend Harvard College, where she continued to struggle with depression and substance abuse.