![]() ![]() Opening the book by portraying herself curled up at a party crying while people looked on, a little bit annoyed by her latest outburst, Wurtzel unsparingly outed herself as a sometimes-out-of-control person – a “rock and roll girl who has violated her body with a tattoo and a nose ring,” a girl her loving mother had given up on – suffering from almost unrelenting depression. It was there even in what is typically a perfunctory author’s note explaining that names have been changed Wurtzel added: “Otherwise, unfortunately for me, every detail is accurate.” It practically bolted off the page, so inhabited, so present was it in every sentence. ![]() ![]() The voice on the page was smart, swerving, prickly, sometimes coy and self-aggrandizing, but undismissable. It was carefully allusive and full of sharp details (cutting lines of cocaine on a Pogues CD a tote bag of bloodied clothes). (Once again, I was 18, and sheltered.) But the book was good. It wasn’t really the kind of book I typically went for – I tended toward highly serious poetry and fiction, in my own way of coping with being a painfully self-conscious teenage girl – and I remember being a little taken aback at the casualness of her voice, her photo on the cover, the obvious self-marketing of it all. I was 18, and a sophomore in college, when Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America was published. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |