A brief encounter in 2007
She was a famous writer, this was all I knew. Elizabeth Wurtzel, exuding grand dame energy, sat before me on the outside patio of the Booktrader’s cafe at Yale. Raspberry lipstick formed a kiss around her cigarette butt, balanced in our shared ashtray. A poet had introduced us, after hearing that I was depressed and had dreams of becoming a writer.
“Were you able to shake off your fan girl from last night?” the poet asked Elizabeth.
“No, she cried all night on my couch,” she replied matter-of-factly.
“Was she okay?”
“I think so. I try to help where I can.” She rummaged around in her summer straw bag for a lighter.
The year was 2007, and I was twenty-two. Elizabeth was forty. Her 1994 memoir, Prozac Nation, had been published in America when I was nine years old and living in Brussels. A Hollywood movie adaptation of Prozac Nation came out in 2001, when I was sixteen and living in Berlin. The movie might have played there, but I didn’t see it. Back then, Berlin was far too busy with itself–dealing with the aftermath of the Berlin wall, and everything. I don’t think there was room for Prozac Nation and besides, we already had Christiane F.
But I understand now that Wurtzel probably assumed I’d known all about her—her book, the film, her other books, and the pile of negative press she’d received. She must have assumed I was there to seek her wisdom, like so many other shy young women before me, who materialized around her like cats. She was on a career transition–the whole concept of which I’d only just learned about, five minutes prior.
A famous writer studying at Yale Law School–this existed, in America? Yep. She just did it. After that, she hoped to explore new professional grounds and to work as a lawyer (doing good, of course), somewhere, somehow, in Manhattan. From behind my glass of shyness, I looked at Elizabeth Wurtzel like she was an exhibit of the American fairy tale.
When I told one of my professors that in my lunch hour, I’d met with a writer named Elizabeth Wurtzel, the old man rolled his eyes:
“That book was such garbage. She tried to write a second book, and a third, but they flopped.”
“I haven’t read them,” I told him.
“Then don’t. She’s everything that’s wrong with American letters right now, and I can’t believe they would let her come here. Putting herself through law school at 40! What kind of lawyer is she going to be? Ridiculous.”
Off I went to buy a copy of Prozac Nation. The tongues spouting that Wurtzel was a has-been, and that her work was passé, only made me want to read her more. I should have been reading my assignments: Old articles about Greek and Latin linguistics, written in staid Victorian English, piled up like sleeping pills on my floor to the tune of a thousand pages a week (it was graduate school, after all). But there was Prozac Nation, that irresistible forbidden fruit, whispering to me with its urgent, raspy, punk-romantic voice: Read me instead!
The voice went to Harvard in the 1980s, coiled up inside the head of a precocious and self-obsessed girl from New York. It stopped for a look inside her 1970s childhood, the teen girl’s bedroom blaring with the music planted there by conniving record label executives. It brimmed with the love of Bruce Springsteen–another artist I’d never heard of—and a melancholic, self-mocking nostalgia for a Brooklyn latch-key-kid adolescence. In the book, Lizzie (the narrator–I’ll call her “Lizzie” to tell her apart from the author, Wurtzel) turns from golden daughter into first troubled teen, then twisted-literary-genius Harvard student, then aspiring Rolling Stone journalist, and finally, a tragic chaos princess whose moody antics exhaust her friends.
Belaboring the modern tension between the belief that virginity is valuable, and the wisdom that it is not, she writes of her virginity: “I gave it away,” to a tall, moneyed, oafish Harvard man, the type “for whom Cliff Notes were invented,” as she rails. I also lost my virginity to a boy who just wanted to check a box, when I was sixteen. He was so inexperienced that he did not realize he would need an erection. So I tried to quickly explain that to him, and then help him produce an erection, even though I’d never done it before. This made me “the dirty one” for the rest of our relationship. Back then, I didn’t have female friends to talk it over with, or a supportive community, so this self-image just molded and festered in my mind. Whereas in Prozac Nation, Lizzie threw herself a “Defloration Party” at Harvard. Wow! It was the most punk thing I’d ever read.
When Journaling meets Journalism
Like millions of girls, I once received the gift of a pink journal with a heart-shaped lock. Over the years, I filled dozens of these notebooks, inking rose and lilac lines, on pages ornamented with insignia of ballet slippers, ribbons and stars. I never knew who would be my journals’ reader—no-one, wasn’t that the point? I imagined a vague and faceless someone from the distant future (maybe one of the children I was yet to have?) tasked with sorting through the belongings of this weird old lady. Until then, my journal pages absorbed all my adolescent rage, and condensed into a paper monument of silent screams.
The journal was my best imaginary friend, a designated space for me to be. I could write myself into existence (and practice my use of too-big metaphors). My collected journals found their first, and only, reader in my boyfriend (the same one), who hated them, and decided to rip them up. He thought they were just “pathetic rants,” and not worth anything.
My journals were gone, as was my courage to write. That changed the instant I found Wurtzel and her memoir, that was so obviously based on her old journals. It was so bubblegum, so dumb, brilliant, suicidal, girly. Above all, it was literary, and it rolled a wave of inspiration into the void of my lost journals. I would write everything back up, I thought, but better, and in English. English was my fourth language (German was my first), and people made fun of my accent. I spoke “world English,” as they called it, “continental English.” Becoming a writer in English would be tricky, I knew.
But Wurtzel’s work said “so what,” on every level, exquisitely free from any doubts whether a young girl’s journals could make for serious literature, whether she could write, or whether she should. She just did it. It read as if she’d just grabbed a few of her old diaries, and unloaded them to the publisher in buckets of word-vomit, and the publisher had said: “OK, we’re printing it!” and boom, famous.
That was a false impression of course. Full of moods, immediacy, and expository sharpness, Prozac Nation is a glimpse of what can happen when the secrecy of journaling meets the public aim of journalism. There were always lots of girls with diaries, but only one Elizabeth Wurtzel. Back in those trainwreck-hungry 1990s, she stepped up deliberately and proudly with her slab of red meat for the media vultures. And they came. Having majored in Journalism at Harvard, Wurtzel dove into its chest of tropes to knock her memoir into a familiar (and oh so moreish) shape. She used tropes like the trainwreck, the good-girl-gone-bad, the hysterical woman, the innocent-girl-wasting-away, and most of all: the confessional.
The confessional form has historically centered on the notion of a found document (sometimes a fabricated one), replete with the carnal confessions of an unknown woman (often a young prostitute, often a dead one). It capitalizes on the public's love of sniffing dirty panties, and on the thrill of said panties’ purported realness. Because Wurtzel plentifully served these prurient interests, two things happened: readers lapped it up, and critics from New York Magazine to Newsweek ripped Wurtzel’s work apart. New York Magazine described the work as “a long moan,” and Newsweek called it “self-absorbed rantings.”
“How did this chick get a book deal in the first place?” marveled the Harvard Crimson, Wurtzel’s alma mater’s daily rag.
It must have been excruciatingly difficult for her not to take these critiques personally. She was just twenty-seven when it came out. Her book was so intensely personal, intimate, and vulnerable in today’s speak. Where did she find her strength?
The answer is in the book itself, buried in a story about Lizzie summer-jobbing at the Dallas Observer. It shows us Lizzie, gabbing away about her relationship problems, daddy issues, and inner angst, and a uniform cohort of cartoonishly boring co-workers, all sharing a single thought bubble: Why is this girl telling us all this stuff?
They arrange for her to go on Oprah, and she almost goes, almost buys into their coaxes that “millions of viewers would find it helpful” if she could get on live television with her estranged father, and really hash out her trauma, for all to see. But at the last minute, Lizzie pulls out. She writes: “It was all about ratings and voyeurism and lurid, grotesque curiosity,” in what feels like a dress rehearsal for her big show: the memoir.
Flat on my belly in the Yale dorm room, I looked up from my reading, and over my shoulder. It was as if the author stood there in a hologram, in an evening dress, and wagging her finger at me: Reader, I can see you!
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The Owl Shop cigar bar in New Haven was where businessmen from downtown came to smoke cigars unironically in pinstripe suits, and writerly Yale kids with dark circles under their eyes slumped over whiskey on the rocks, scribbling into notebooks. Someone was telling a story about what happened to them last week in New York, and in the warm light of a table candle, Elizabeth looked so beautiful: long, blond, slightly damaged hair shining golden, almost catching fire. I looked at her in silence, thinking: This is exactly where I want to be, right now.
“Everyone is so young,” she said. “It feels weird being back in school. I have to get used to it again.” She took a sip of red wine. “And the weirdest thing is, if you talk about something that happened outside of Yale, it’s like you’re trying to sell them snake oil. They don’t want to hear it. They don’t care about who you were before you came.”
“I thought they would, with you,” the barmaid jumped in. She had been low key listening to our conversation, drying a few glasses, and watching Elizabeth attentively all along.
The more I interacted with Elizabeth, the more I realized what a big deal she was. She often had these shopping bags stuffed with messy wads of papers that had her handwriting on it, and manilla folders that she lugged around with her. Absolutely everybody knew her. And her dog, of course, whom she brought everywhere with her.
I’d missed her whole Act One, and like a latecomer at a theater, I was doltishly catching up from the program notes. Her second act, Law-School-Elizabeth, was a performance in its own right. It could have been titled: “Watch Elizabeth Wurtzel walk out of the bed of her own making.”
“Law School is so rough,” she’d say with a pained look. “I have all this reading left to do, and it’s so complicated, and I’m so far behind, and ugh… I’m freaking out.”
“Me too,” I’d say, “and my reading list for the summer is just humongous.”
“But I have my therapy dog. I love her so much,” she buried a sparkly red manicure in the dog’s back.
How do you get a therapy dog? I wondered, quietly, without asking.
On campus before #mentalhealth
One morning at my academic department, another graduate student greeted me with a dark mien and said: “Liz had a mental breakdown last night.”
There was a pause. “I was alone with her, and her sadness is so relentless. Gosh, I’ve never felt so helpless in my whole life. It’s just unbelievable to see it, how she suffers, and to know that she has to live with that—”
For everyone else, it was “get a grip.” But when it was the famous Elizabeth Wurtzel having a meltdown, it was suddenly deadly serious. I was jealous. Elizabeth carried a heavy load, but so did we all. She was stressing out like any Yale student. I had a friend in graduate school, who turned pale and started shaking with panic every time she got a “C” on a test. This was an accomplished scholar, and yet, always so terrified that she would get kicked out of Yale if she didn’t perform, and then her world would end. Senior professors would find the time to say: “Aw, Yale is a hard school,” tipping her over the edge. “You used to be a big fish in a small pond, didn’t you.” If you wanted to be part of Yale, you were supposed to be able to take the heat. It was not for the faint of heart, as people said back then.
From today’s point of view, I can only think: What kind of ableist, sanist crap was that, and why didn’t anyone call it? But at the time, the first thing I felt was invisible, and secondly, green envy that when she broke down in tears, now that was uniquely tragic. Nobody would have used the word “pathetic,” or thought she was making a big deal out of nothing. That was a fire she had already been through.
David Foster Wallace once penned the caricature of an unnamed friend, whom he called “The depressed person,” ostensibly based on Lizzie from Prozac Nation. Because Wallace and Wurtzel were friends in real life (it was even rumored that they’d been lovers), it’s hard to tell whether the story was also based on his impressions of the real Elizabeth. Commingling perspectives, the piece balanced between suggesting that it was based on a real living person, who was exhausting and warranted a legitimate complaint–and that the whole thing was all make-believe, wolf-crying fakery, which made it fair game. It was published as fiction, but it re-stated things that you could also read in Prozac Nation. With the signature Wallacian linguistic hyperspecificity, it suspended readers in a state of not-quite-knowing whether the woman in the description existed in real life, in Wurtzel’s nonfiction, Wallace’s fiction, or either/other/all.
By the time she got to Yale Law School, Wurtzel was snugly enveloped in the habit of her public depressed literary character. She wove artfully between the interstices of person and persona, text and self, memory and memoir, comfortable and familiar in that very peculiar hall of mirrors that surrounds any one who writes memoir. It’s both a mask and an unmasking, both revelation and cover.
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Mental health concerns of my own had led me down the path of Yale’s ill-named Division of Mental Hygiene (DMH) and antipsychotics like Abilify and Zyprexa, which had the effect of a hammer on my brain. Whatever used to feel intense and sparkly became a sludge, a blur and a fog. I could hardly study any more.
I remember only odd chunks of a day trip I took to New York, with Elizabeth: the bone marrow toast I ate at the dark Italian restaurant, and the floor tiling at the art collector’s house: black marble, with a map of New York chiseled into it. I remember Elizabeth, conversing quietly with the host, or was it the painter, or the painter’s long, thin mother? Drugged out of my mind, I always just nodded and agreed with everybody else. This was a crowd that ran on Champagne, coke and Adderall, and with me being in an utterly flattened and subdued state, a dark chasm of perception gaped between us.
I talked to Elizabeth about this. “My medications are slowing me down,” I said, “has this happened to you?”
She wasn’t thrilled about the topic, but she listened, eyes narrowed. I wanted to talk to her about symptoms, medications and side effects, but she stopped me.
“Where did you find your therapist?” she asked.
“I just went to the student counseling services.”
“What, did you check their background first?”
“No.” I didn’t know you could do that. I had never seen a therapist before I came to America, and until this very minute, it never occurred to me that I should have picked one, like I would a manicure artist. Jolts of shame overcame me. So I hadn’t done my homework.
“Why did you pick that therapist?”
“I didn’t pick them, they assigned one…”
She didn’t say anything, she just looked at me.
Oh, come on, I thought. I was already living with the consequences of my ignorance. Not only had the Yale-owned DMH therapist immediately prescribed me the horrible big-gun medication on the first appointment, but they had also–and this was far worse–leaked my mental health information to my academic dean.
“Try my therapist,” Wurtzel scribbled a number down for me in her notebook, and tore out the sheet.
When I called, a very surprised receptionist kept asking how I knew “Liz,” and whether we were friends, how close exactly, or what. (Note: She always remained Elizabeth Wurtzel to me. I was never able to call her “Liz.”)
It turned out that a private therapist was much too expensive. My graduate school stipend was about $1,800 a month, before tax, half of which went back to Yale for the dorm, and the co-pay for my medications, which were still under patent then, so they were about $200 each for a monthly supply. I couldn’t afford these therapy sessions that started at $200 a pop, “...and we recommend once a day, at the beginning.”
Oh well!
Wurtzel and I had a few more coffees that year. I didn’t want to ask her any more intrusive questions. I felt so ashamed that I’d blown the phone call with her therapist, and that I was still stuck on the bad meds. I never brought up Prozac Nation, and neither did she. I just watched her, like a role model to remember for a distant future me, for when I got healthy. I never got around to telling her that I wanted to be a writer too.
One thing I wasn’t aware of, back then, was that she had a $100,000 advance from Penguin, the first $33,000 of which had already been disbursed to her in 2003, so that she would write “another book about depression.” She never delivered that book. Instead, she held out and kept everyone guessing for nine years, until the publisher called game-over and sued her in 2012, to recoup the advance–with interest.
In the Odyssey, when Odysseus is away, suitors eager for the throne keep asking Penelope when she is going to pick a new husband already. “He ain’t coming back,” they say. She smiles and tells them she will pick a new husband just as soon as she’s finished her tapestry. Every day, she works at it, weaving and spinning, and every night, she secretly undoes the day’s work, so she will never have to choose. I understand now that Elizabeth Wurtzel, far from desperately attempting to reproduce the success of Prozac Nation, was quietly pulling a Penelope, weaving a little of her yarn each day, and each night unraveling it. Like a canvas she’d painted and never finished, but abandoned, Prozac Nation had been her juvenalia, and she refused to let the world use it as a net to catch her. She was walking free, away from the work, from the web and the world of that work, and on to brand new ventures.
#
The year after, in 2008, I went on a mandated leave of absence from Yale. It was followed by a brief, but devastating, attempt to return to campus in 2009, while I clawed my way through the deluge that is antipsychotic medication withdrawal. It was a longer, more painful process than I could have imagined, and it took over nine months.
Nine months is a long time to never sleep, to feel as if you’re trapped on mushrooms, and to look and sound deranged. Family and friends wanted me to get back on my medications, but I refused. I was totally gung-ho on going cold turkey. I was finally breaking out of my molecular shell of silence and shyness I’d been trapped in, and I wasn’t going back.
I had many raw and clumsy arguments, like You’re trying to deny my existence, and You were never a friend in the first place. Afterwards, I didn’t speak with my parents for years. The boy left me (finally!). I dropped out of Yale. And I lost touch with Elizabeth Wurtzel.
From a mutual friend, I heard that Elizabeth ended up failing her bar exam at first. She then passed it, on her second attempt, and found work at the legal offices of Boies Schiller in New York. Chrysalis empty, career transition complete: Elizabeth Wurtzel had done it.
Prozac Nation, you were here: encounter in Los Angeles, 2024
To this very day, one thing keeps bugging me: when did she go off Prozac? Surely, she must have? And the Mellaril? How did withdrawal work for her? How could she so elegantly breeze through it? Was she Superwoman? Sure, Elizabeth Wurtzel had been an early Prozac user. She was part of the beginning. What about the end?
The year is 2024, and Prozac Nation is turning thirty. I was on the bus and holding my tatty copy, to revisit the story that had first given me confidence that my silly-girl diaries might be a “serious” work.
Next to me, a red-faced old man spotted the title, and struck up a conversation. He didn’t know Wurtzel, but he knew Prozac. He said he used to take it. I told him Prozac Nation was a “novel” based on the experiences of one of the first people who ever took Prozac, a Harvard student in the 1980s. He thought that was very interesting.
“I used to know the woman who wrote this,” I said. “But she died.”
“It’s been quite a while since I took Prozac,” he said.
“Did it help you?” I asked.
“A little, I guess,” he shrugged. He seemed nonplussed, and changed the subject: “I’m just on my way now to my friend’s place, he’s got my Social Security card. I’m gonna pick that up, and some paperwork he’s holding for me.”
He didn’t have a place of his own, only friends who were storing stuff for him. He’d just finished “a program”—jail, rehab, shelter? I didn’t ask–and here he was, washed up, chewed, and spat out from an institutional circuit of mental health, corrective and correctional treatments that maintain a tight grip on so many people who have also tried Prozac.
After thirty years of antidepressants in our society, we can see the scam for what it is: a class of drugs with heavy side effects and a measly 15% success rate. Other purported saviors for the modern melancholic, like electro-cranial stimulation and AI-enabled therapy apps (and soon, Elon Musk’s brain implant), are on the rise and set to elbow antidepressants out of their formidable market share.
But a treatment can only be as good as our understanding of its causes, and that is precisely where we come up short, and the DSM (the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, a bible for psychiatrists) is not exactly a help. Before anyone can find a cure for depression, the real work must involve thinking about depression beyond the clinical and into our culture and its relation to loneliness, race, gender, personal finances, and social participation in the digital age. Is “depression” even the right word? It has been thirty years and not only are we not done talking about depression; we may need to reconsider and unlearn everything we think we know.
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“Deus ex machina” literally means “god out of a machine”: a crane gradually lowering an actor onto the ancient Greek stage, a god descending from above to solve some intractable human problem. As plot devices go, a “deus ex machina” twist is rarely liked in modern criticism. It’s not secular, and begs the question of whether the playwright ran out of options for their own plot, or whether the ancient Greek manuscript was posthumously tampered with by a Christian scribe trying to squeeze in a miracle. Could the text be corrupt? This question popped up like a big bubble: Is Wurtzel using the miracle of redemption through psychopharmacology to manufacture a good ending?
“What I really want is to be saved,” she writes, borrowing from a tale as old as time. Lizzie is a Victorian horror “poison girl,” an uncanny “living doll,” but at the end of it all, she only yearns to find her personal Jesus and his “safe haven in his little house in Providence.”
The “save me” trope spans all over Prozac Nation like a tent, processing Lizzie’s tale through narrative devices and imagery we’re already familiar with since centuries. So was it her story, or was it a story? In the age of fake news, photoshop and ChatGPT, we’re so attuned to spotting tinkering and doctoring of the ever-elusive truth. We notice when people desperately seek to escape the shame of being average, by overlaying upon their selves a hasty mask of manufactured greatness, or emotional generosity.
Prozac Nation is like a literary ancestor to our modern instagram filters, our photo dumps—cultivating an air of spontaneity, but actually carefully constructed, according to classic rules. This is not to say it isn’t a true story. I believe Wurtzel 100%. It’s the arrangement of the story that I don’t buy, especially the ending. Prozac rides in, on the white horse of science, and it hits the memoir like a magic bullet apt to solve everything, and tie up all the loose ends. It comes in as a clean exit route from a story that, otherwise, would have kept twisting and turning. Then again, it was only natural to end with redemption, for a memoir that leans so far into the tropes of the confessional, hysteria and the fallen woman. If she wasn’t going to end this story with marriage, like the most conventional memoirs do, at least it’s still going to end with penetration–by the psychiatric phallus of masculine science, going into the crazy girl’s body and pacifying her with pharmacology, right?
Still, I thought, this is a memoir, did she really need this? Doesn’t everyone know that life is not shaped like a classical plot?
Not in America, I mused. The Hero’s Journey has eaten all other plot types, because it’s easy to adapt for movie scripts that people in the entertainment industry already know how to produce. So, in order to fit the corset of a Hollywood-able “hero’s journey,” it was acceptable to clip, squeeze, and bend narratives, even nonfictional ones, to size.
In true classicist fashion, I now feel convinced there must be another ending to Prozac Nation somewhere out there, one that the publishers had refused to print. Perhaps it exists as an early review copy that was later rescinded, or in a handwritten draft manuscript somewhere. I don’t even know whether there’s such a thing as an Elizabeth Wurtzel archive, and whether I could take a peek there. Easy enough to Google, I suppose, but why. I prefer to believe that someday, I’ll be trawling the rare books stores in New York, and suddenly light upon an early copy that contains that mysterious excised ending. Alternatively, if I want to experience the real ending of Prozac Nation, I can simply look around the actual nation today. It has been thirty years now that people have used antidepressants to try and help themselves. Away from the constraints of plotted-out storytelling, in the untold, jilted and unheeded world of not-fiction, the real ending sits before us in plain sight. It’s not very good, and no page-turning memoir has been written about it yet.
*Writing this essay was supported in part by the Catwalk Art Institute, and gratefully acknowledged.
