Elizabeth Wurtzel
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Elizabeth Wurtzel (born July 31, 1967 in New York City) is an American writer.
Brought up Jewish, she attended Ramaz for high school. While an undergraduate at Harvard College, she wrote for The Harvard Crimson and received the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award. She has battled heroin abuse and addiction to cocaine and Ritalin. As of 2005, Wurtzel attends Yale Law School.
Wurtzel is best known for publishing her groundbreaking memoir, Prozac Nation, at the age of 26. The book chronicles her battle with depression while a college undergraduate. 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.
In her second book, Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, she remarked 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. She also published a second autobiographic volume with the title More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction (2001), which centers around her addiction to the prescription medication Ritalin. She has also written for The New Yorker and New York Magazine.
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[edit] 9/11 remarks
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.[1]
[edit] Bibliography
- Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir (1994)
- Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1999)
- The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for Uncommon Women (2001) (previously published as Radical Sanity)
- More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction (2001)
[edit] References
- ^ "Analysis: Generation X may view September 11th events as a way to shape their generation"; Bob Edwards, Morning Edition (NPR), October 22, 2001
