An Unlikely Ode to the Late Elizabeth Wurtzel (1967–2020); Or, Fuck Cancer
I didn’t know the memoirist Elizabeth Wurtzel. I never read Prozac Nation. I never read it for all the reasons that Wurtzel notes in this on-fire piece she wrote for The Guardian two years ago and that I read for the first time this morning-the stuff that made her a lightning rod for people’s ire, or at the very least their irritation and dismissal. Mine included.
Prozac Nation published in September 1994, three months after I graduated from college, to much sensationalism and plenty of mixed reviews, and predictably rocketed to buzzword, bestseller status. I played my Gen X “color me unimpressed” part by ignoring it and its author. It didn’t help that during the preceding two or three years, everyone I knew on my college campus who went to see a mental health professional-myself included-was offered, usually inside of a first-time appointment, a scrip for either Prozac or Ritalin or both. The new wonder drugs for depression and ADD/ADHD. Even in small-town Minnesota, all that stuff was being doled out as though it were Advil.
So I didn’t have to read Prozac Nation to be ready to unfairly judge and mentally trash it at the time. In 1994, I was 21, also a writer, also depressed, broke, unconnected, angry, and attempting to enter the workforce during a recession economy that wouldn’t budge in any visibly better direction for another four to five years. That Wurtzel was beautiful, precocious, alternately smart and flaky in her public persona, from a privileged NYC background I was all too familiar with and jealous of, and only five years older than I was made it easy to react to her, the mere idea of her, and an uninformed idea of her at that, with scorn. I was able to easily mix and swallow my own paradoxical cocktail of eye-rolling, disdain, and envy about Wurtzel in about 30 seconds, without meeting her, reading her, and without once acknowledging much less examining that all that was about me and my own emotional baggage, not about her or her writing.
I write all this now because after a mutual friend posted the sad news of Wurtzel’s passing at the age of 52 earlier today on social media — sharing a number of posts throughout the day with smart, fascinating, nuanced, and self-reflective stories about her own visceral, and later evolving, reactions to Wurtzel and to Prozac Nation — I read this 2018 Guardian piece by Wurtzel about the cancer that killed her.
What struck me was, what a voice. It doesn’t matter whether it’s likeable. (And god knows, that voice doesn’t give a fuck whether you or I like it or not.) It doesn’t matter whether you agree with her. It doesn’t matter whether you take the bold, inflammatory, and contradictory statements in this piece, some of them infuriating, at face value, or if you pause to recognize that some greater, more nuanced argumentation and technique may be at work.
The voice here is ferocious. Unapologetic. Full of rage. Funny as hell. Provocative. Charming. Intelligent. Solipsistic. Irritating. Unflinching. Honest. Shape shifting. Complicated. This voice will not be tamed. It’s saying complex things about lifelong depression, health care, mental health, the media, misogyny. It’s flipping the bird to cancer by giving it a verbal hug-a powerful message even when the writer is still alive and battling the cancer in question. This voice is saying all that and more, in less than 1,600 words.
If you listen closely, it’s also a voice that insists that you go get tested for the BRCA mutation if you’re an Ashkenazi Jewish woman. Beneath that, it’s telling all women to take charge of their own health care, including getting Pap smears, mammograms, and the like, because early detection saves lives. Beneath that, it’s smiling while also telling you to go fuck yourself.
Read it. You might hear something quite different from what you expected.
Oh, and fuck cancer.
Rest in power, Elizabeth Wurtzel (1967–2020).
Originally published at http://deroom.wordpress.com on January 7, 2020.
