Elizabeth & Me
Elizabeth Wurtzel is dead, and, like Carrie Fisher (also gone long before her time), another loud and proud voice in the mental illness discourse falls silent. Her 1994 book Prozac Nation not only revealed the previously unexplored, extremely unpleasant world of female depression and anxiety, but ushered in the era of the confessional, warts-and-all memoir, and for that I both loved and deeply resented her.
I was 22 when Prozac Nation was released, just a few years younger than Elizabeth, and several years deep into a battle with depression. Anxiety (not to mention probably undiagnosed ADHD) had been with me for what felt like my whole life, but this was something new and insidious, and seemed almost like a separate part of myself very intent on hurting the other parts. Having been told that everything our parents used to numb their feelings -- drinking, drugs, casual sex, etc. -- was actually bad for you, Generation X was left floundering, frantically grasping at some sort of lifeline. In the era before blogging and social media, where there is virtually nothing that people keep a secret anymore (be that for good or ill), to have someone, anyone write about what it was like to be “young and depressed in America” was a revelation.
Reading Prozac Nation was both exhilarating--finally, someone admits how miserable they are!--and frustrating. I recognized some of myself in Elizabeth’s freewheeling style of writing, and yet I didn’t either. Our similarities began and ended with sharing the same mental illness, and being of the same generation. She was beautiful, wealthy and well-educated, and her descriptions of weekend long benders of sex and drugs sounded at least as decadent and glamorous as they were dangerous. I was not beautiful, or rich, and I dropped out of college because I had to get a full-time job instead. More often than not, my benders involved gorging myself on food (and often vomiting it back up) and sleeping for 12 hours at a time. I didn’t see it as Elizabeth merely “doing depression” differently than me, but better, somehow, in a way that people would find more interesting and, frankly, attractive.
Both Elizabeth and her publisher were keenly aware of that angle, and used it to remarkable results. Elizabeth’s iconic image on the cover of Prozac Nation made her look like an alt-rock dream girl, right down to the artfully messy hair and cropped t-shirt. Her pose and pout suggested that someone could fuck the sadness out of her if they tried hard enough. Whether Elizabeth intended it or not (and my guess is she did not), that cover, and the frequently graphic depictions of her sex life, contributed heavily to a most grotesque stereotype, that of “crazy pussy,” the girl you won’t settle down with because she’s just too much to handle, but will hook up with every now and then because she’ll do anything in bed. You know, that girl who’s just so sexy and wild, who probably needs to be medicated and treated by a doctor, but you’re too busy letting her blow you in a nightclub parking lot.
Of course, for a while I directed my anger and disgust over that stereotype at women like Elizabeth Wurtzel, instead of the men who upheld it (and continue to do so). It wasn’t her fault that when it comes to mental illness discourse, even well into the 21st century, women over 40, women of color, LGBTQ+ women, fat women, and disabled women are often left out. Like a lot of subjects involving women, we’re not interested in talking about it if there isn’t a suitably pleasing face and body attached to it. Elizabeth was merely using what God gave her as an advantage. It was a bizarre jealousy on my part, a misguided belief that if I looked like her, maybe things wouldn’t be so bad.
The “sad sexy baby” thing sold plenty of books, but didn’t do Elizabeth much good with critics, who blasted her “incoherent” writing (though, really, it wasn’t any more incoherent than the kind of stuff professional Troubled Boy Jack Kerouac was lauded for) and her lack of filter. She was simply saying too much, about herself, her problems, her sex life, whatever, and though that kind of memoir writing became its own separate genre, it’s one that even today is viewed with distaste, particularly when a woman writes it. To write “too much” about yourself, whether positively or negatively, is to be an attention seeker, or a drama queen. The sexism leveled at Elizabeth for “oversharing” was the same kind of sexism that made me believe I didn’t matter because I wasn’t beautiful, it was just wrapped in a different package.
So maybe Elizabeth and I, we were more alike than I realized.
More than 25 years have passed since Prozac Nation was published. Elizabeth wrote a couple more books, each of them greeted with the same grumbling as to whether or not she deserved her success as a writer (which, if we’re going to have that conversation, I could spend all day listing the names of writers, most of them male, whose worthiness of success is questionable at best). Some years back she wrote an essay about her fear of aging, in her typically rambling, occasionally disjointed yet always entertaining style. It was, of course, met largely with derision, as if the idea that a woman’s value in the world decreases the older she gets was absurd, and it was just another example of Elizabeth Wurzel’s out of touch, poor little rich girl self-absorption.
It’s not a well-written piece. It cries out for an editor’s hand, and her references to expensive cosmetics and how she managed to get into Harvard Law School “despite some questionable credentials” seemed almost designed to alienate anyone outside of her immediate purview. And yet, there was heart in it. Unlike a lot of male writers, who write about their lives with a sort of clinical detachment, she was still unapologetically messy. I suspect Elizabeth knew there was a chance she would be mocked for the article, for complaining that despite having everything, she was still, at least a little bit, unhappy and dissatisfied with her life. And yet, she went ahead and did it anyway.
Though it’s gotten a little better over the years, there’s still a distinct message that if you’re a woman struggling with mental illness, you better damn well be sure you do it in a cool and attractive way. A quick perusal of the #mentalillness tag on Instagram shows mostly pictures of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and endless memes, but also more than a few photos of conventionally attractive young women who took a lot of time to put on makeup and choose just the right filter to illustrate how depressed they are. It’s fine, that’s how it is. That’s what we respond to, and maybe if the idea that even beautiful people can feel an inexplicable sorrow can get through to enough of us, we’ll start to care a little more.
There was even an heir to Elizabeth’s throne in Cat Marnell, another privileged, model-pretty young New York writer who seemed intent on not just self-destructing, but doing it where everyone could see her, first at the now-defunct XOJane, and then later for Vice, who seemed to condone, if not encourage her illness, because readers found it alternately engrossing, repulsive and/or titillating. It was gross and irresponsible -- but not on her part, on the part of Vice, and on the part of her fans, who both cheered her on, and made bets on when she’d be found dead. Her writing has gotten the same exact criticism as Elizabeth’s, that it’s incoherent, self-absorbed, and, above all else, simply too much information. I admit that when I first heard of Cat Marnell I reacted to her with the same distaste as I did for Elizabeth initially. Oh boy, here’s another sexy crazy girl making a broken, unhealthy life sound aspirational. But you know what, she has problems, I have problems, we all have problems. We just handle it differently, and the world makes us pay for that in its own cruel way.
I must admit, when I heard that Elizabeth had passed, cancer wasn’t the first thing that came to my mind. I had lost track of her over the years, and regrettably was unaware that she had become an advocate for genetic testing in the fight against breast cancer. The last I heard, she had gotten a law degree in her early 40s, but eventually quit practicing law to return to writing full-time. I felt that same, ugly little surge of resentment--how nice it must be to piss away hundreds of thousands of dollars like it was nothing. And then I got over myself and realized that she was simply trying to find something that made her happy, that gave her a reason to keep fighting the thing that lived inside her brain, the same thing that lives in mine.
If I had a lot of expendable income, I don’t know that I wouldn’t blow some of it on a college degree and then decide I didn’t want to do anything with it. We take the crumbs of happiness we can get, and some of us can afford bigger crumbs than others, and that’s no one’s fault except how the dice were rolled. I don’t know much about Elizabeth’s final years, other than she did, eventually, marry, despite believing she never would. I hope she found happiness, and I hope she kept it close to her, private, a warm little light that no one could minimize or question if she deserved it.
