Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel was born on July 31, 1967, in New York City, a place whose restless energy would find its way into the confessional prose she later made her signature. She was educated at the Ramaz School before going on to Harvard College and, eventually, Yale Law School, tracing an academic path that moved between the literary and the legal.
Her career spanned journalism, writing, and law, and her work in English drew consistently on her own experience — chronicling personal struggles with depression, addiction, career, and relationships. That unguarded approach found its fullest early expression in Prozac Nation, published when Wurtzel was twenty-seven, an autobiographical account that contributed to a broader boom in confessional writing and the personal memoir genre during the 1990s. She was viewed during that period as a voice of Generation X, a designation that attached itself to her work as much as to her public presence.
Her path through the law added another dimension to a life already defined by its range of vocations: she was, in the course of her career, a journalist, a writer, an autobiographer, and a lawyer. She held United States citizenship and worked within the English language throughout. Elizabeth Wurtzel died on January 7, 2020, in Manhattan — the borough where she had been born more than five decades earlier — from breast cancer. Her death closed a life spent largely within the city that had shaped her, and her final years returned her, geographically at least, to where it had all begun.
Quotes by Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Wurtzel's insights on:
I believe women who are supported by men are prostitutes; that is that, and I am heartbroken to live through a time where Wall Street money means these women are not treated with due disdain.
The idea of throwing away my depression, of having to create a whole personality, a whole way of living and being that did not contain misery as its leitmotif, was daunting.
I was the only person going to a prostitute in search of true love. But somehow, no matter how often I was disappointed, I was always game for the next round, like a drug addict hoping that a new fix will give him a rush as good as the first one. Only I’d never even had the initial euphoria that makes a junkie keep coming back for more. I always sought solace in places where I knew, I didn’t belong.
And I always feel so stupid sitting in therapy talking about my problems because, Jesus Christ, so what? I can’t equate the amount of pain and misery and despair I have suffered and endured as a depressive with the events of my life, which just seem so common.
The words madness allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry, there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony.
So many more cycles of elation of the first kiss, and devastation when it’s over.
Depression gave me extreme perspicacity; rather than skin, it was as if I had only thin gauze bandages to shield me from everything I saw.
Bad girls understand that there is no point in being good and suffering in silence. What good has good ever done?