Author Wurtzel Finds a Niche for the Bitch

Your understanding of yourself makes other people feel understood themselves—and that’s all very good,” a therapist told Elizabeth Wurtzel ’89 midway into rehab. “But where has it landed you? It’s landed you in a mental hospital.”

The author of Prozac Nation, the autobiography of depression that spoke to a generation, returns now with More, Now, Again, her second memoir before reaching the age of 35. The book chronicles her descent into addiction and slow rise to recovery. In an age of perpetual confession and personal narratives, Wurtzel is gambling on the persistence of her own appeal.

Wurtzel chooses a tiny, candlelit French eatery buried in New York’s West Village for our interview. While at Harvard, she won a Rolling Stone College Journalism Award for her music writing in The Crimson.

Entering, she spots a writer she knows, author and journalist Douglas Cooper, sitting by the window. “Every time I see you, you’re being interviewed,” he grins.

She smiles too, impishly, unraveling her blonde hair from a scarf. “Well, have you written a bunch of books about your problems?”

Cooper later compares Wurtzel to La Traviata or a martyred saint: a figure we love to watch suffer. “Ordinary suffering tends to be kind of dull, whereas the Passion of Liz is pathos raised to the pitch of art porn,” he writes in an e-mail. “Agony on ecstasy. If drag queens are not dressing as Elizabeth Wurtzel 30 years down the road, I’ll be deeply surprised.”

In More, Now, Again, Wurtzel marshals the same unsparing detail and narcissism mingled with self-deprecation that characterized Prozac Nation. Hovering around boldness but dallying with melodrama, she begins by describing how she holed up in Florida to write her second book, Bitch. Wurtzel emerged from the success of Prozac Nation armed with a cocaine habit compounded by a growing Ritalin addiction.

Even when she was snorting up to 38 crushed-up pills a day, Wurtzel says she believed her habit, however disturbing, was essentially harmless.

“I am abusing a drug that’s basically for six-year-olds,” she laments in More, Now, Again when her denial begins to fade. “I could not imagine walking into an N.A. meeting and talking about addiction to Ritalin. Everyone would laugh! It’s just too weird and smarmy, too pathetic. So uncool.”

Wurtzel herself has criticized the way that drug use and addiction, particularly in women, tend to be glamorized in the media. But on the face of it, Wurtzel’s tales of fanatically seeking drugs, getting caught shoplifting, razing the relationships in her life and developing an obsession with porn are hardly alluring.

“I actually have to say that most of my behavior while on drugs was just gross or embarrassing,” she says, mentioning a particularly graphic passage in More, Now, Again, in which an isolated, drug-addled Wurtzel becomes obsessed with tweezing each hair on her legs and eventually takes to plucking at her skin:

“After a while, the whole point is the digging. What else is there under my skin? What will I find inside of there?…My goal becomes finding a bone, getting far enough into my leg to touch ossified ivory mass, to massage my own skeleton with my Tweezerman scalpel. I work on this task for hours. Blood spurts everywhere, the white tile on the bathroom floor is covered with stains, blood drips down my legs, there is blood on my hands, blood on the sundress I wear, and I am too busy trying to find a bone to notice.”

But even that episode, however horrifying, takes on a romantic cast in the telling. As she says in the book, “Just because you feel deeply and indiscriminately does not mean that your feelings are indications of anything other than your flat-out fucked-up life.” Though many take issue with the chosen outlet of her talents, it takes skill to suffer as beautifully and artistically as Wurtzel. Her lack of shame in laying bare the details is only the beginning.

By some happy accident of timing, Wurtzel delivered Prozac Nation, which was entirely about her own experience, into a world that was poised to debate depression openly for the first time in the face of sudden availability of drugs like Prozac.

“Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna,” was how the New York Times Book Review described her at that point. Despite its autobiographical cast, Prozac Nation was universalized into a cultural moment, packaged as a symbol and embraced into a canon of disaffected Gen-X plaints. The book has since been adapted into a film starring Christina Ricci and will be released by Miramax in May.

Wurtzel is aware that a cultural climate dominated by national tragedy and international unrest may not be entirely receptive to the confessions of a socially privileged, middle-class drug addict, but remains hopeful.

“I think people are sick of cultural analysis,” she says frankly. “I think now we need people to tell stories.”

***

“Elizabeth, you photograph too well to be depressed,” writes one fan on an Internet message board that is dedicated to her work, but is rife with love poetry and depression confessions.

The debate over Wurtzel’s use of her image began with the charmingly vulnerable confrontation of Prozac Nation’s cover, but really blew up with Bitch. Its original cover presented a topless Wurtzel, grinning knowingly and extending her middle finger at the world.

The book, a brazen celebration of bad girls and contradiction, was ostensibly not about Wurtzel herself, and the photo triggered uproar among the press, few of whom failed to mention it in reviews. It also helped attract considerable attention among readers, who have unfailingly responded better to Wurtzel than the press and made her books bestsellers.

It seems regrettable that a writer’s airbrushed nipples might garner more discussion than her prose, and Wurtzel admits that the “photo doesn’t represent me at all.” But she insists that, publicity ploys aside, “that picture was just kind of an execution of what I was trying to say, which is that you can be many things all at once. That I felt like feminism hadn’t accomplished its goals if a woman doesn’t get to be many things at once.”

Still, the cover of More, Now, Again features only words, though there is a photo on the back cover of her reclining that she likes. “There’s no way I’m ever doing that again,” she says, exasperated by the furor over her Bitch cover shot. “But can you imagine anyone ever complaining that like, Joni Mitchell was on the cover of her album? It’s the stupidest thing.”

Three years ago, in a contentious Time cover story on the future of feminism, Wurtzel, who had just published Bitch, was one of few other young writers and public figures accused of replacing feminist action with self-seeking navel gazing.

But Wurtzel’s position in the young feminist canon is debatable. She may embody some of its philosophies in her apologetic zeal for personal liberty, but analyzing gender no longer seems a priority to her. When asked about the topic, she admits she hasn’t thought much about it since Bitch, and struggles to articulate her position through a slew of personal anecdotes and desultory political tangents.

“I guess I always had this idea that as long as you did the right thing, as long as you had the basics, you could then do anything else you wanted,” is what she settles on. She pauses. “That isn’t really how the world sees things, so something is missing.”

***

Hunched in the chill, we head down a street, past the onetime residence of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Does anybody really remember what she wrote?” Wurtzel demands, pointing it out.

“‘O World, I cannot hold thee close enough?’” I offer.

She frowns. “Maybe. Anybody, what people remember is the persona, and her name. They don’t remember what she wrote. Same with Dorothy Parker: People remember these witty things she said and all the crazy things she had going on, but they don’t know that she wrote all these short stories.”

Wurtzel herself seems confused as to how much she wants to be remembered for her well-crafted pathologies rather than her literature. “I don’t know what to do if I am not inspiring some sort of false fascination,” she confesses in More, Now, Again, in typically articulate reflexivity.

“It’s very ironic as the audience for books has gotten more rarefied, and all these people complain that not enough people read, it should make people happy when a book or an author is accessible,” Wurtzel says when asked about the criticisms of her work. “But instead, it makes them nervous, and it makes them feel like there’s some reason not to take it seriously.”

At the suggestion that those critics might be afraid that celebrity culture is infecting books, which they regard as a last refuge where looks or personality are inconsequential beside the words on the page, she replies, with some heat, “That’s so stupid! It doesn’t have to matter; it can go either way. I mean, Radiohead: does anybody really care about Thom Yorke’s personality? I don’t think so. But everybody cares about Courtney Love’s personality, and Hole sells records. It doesn’t have to be any one way.” (Notably, Entertainment Weekly called Wurtzel “the Courtney Love of letters,” referring perhaps to their shared ability to interest the world in their cycles of audacity and crisis.)

***

“Lizzie Was Doing Drugs,” booms the headline of a New York Daily news cover. It originally referred to scandal-ridden socialite Lizzie Grubman, but here, framed and prominently displayed on a shelf in Wurtzel’s apartment, the joke needs no explanation.

Wurtzel is still moving in, so the apartment carries that quality of frenzied transition, laden with piles of books and records. Wurtzel offers to show me a draft for the trailer of Prozac Nation. It blinks on, dreamy and wordless, drifting on the sound of Lou Reed singing “Perfect Day.”

“It’s very eerie,” says Wurtzel, standing back to watch Christina Ricci looking lost and haunted. “She looks just like me back then.” Though there’s little apparent physical resemblance, there is something surprisingly similar, a wild-eyed quality mingled with composure.

What was it like watching her life’s travails enacted onscreen? “Upsetting,” she says. “I was weeping. Everyone was. You are constantly trapped in someone’s hell.”

Wurtzel only has praise for the performances of the actors, which, in addition to Ricci and Lange, include such youthful stars as Jason Biggs, Jonathan Rhys-Myers and Michelle Williams.

She curls up in an armchair, more relaxed now, to return to the troubling topics of persona and confession. “If I only thought people could get some creepy thrill from it, that would be horrendous,” she muses, stroking her cat. “There is a message of redemption. And to not get across the message of human possibility would be bad. But if it’s not a fun story, it’s not a story worth telling.”