Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America : A Memoir
- Book Review,
by Elizabeth Wurtzel, Riverhead Books
Amazon.com
Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger in the faint pulse of a generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. A memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation still manages to be a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era.
From Publishers Weekly
Twenty-six-year-old Wurtzel, a former critic of popular music for New York and the New Yorker, recounts in this luridly intimate memoir the 10 years of chronic, debilitating depression that preceded her treatment with Prozac in 1990. After her parents' acrimonious divorce, Wurtzel was raised by her mother on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The onset of puberty, she recalls, also marked the onset of recurrent bouts of acute depression, sending her spiraling into episodes of catatonic despair, masochism and hysterical crying. Here she unsparingly details her therapists, hospitalizations, binges of sex and drug use and the paralyzing spells of depression which afflicted her in high school and as a Harvard undergraduate and culminated in a suicide attempt and ultimate diagnosis of atypical depression, a severe, episodic psychological disorder. The title is misleading, for Wurtzel skimps on sociological analysis and remains too self-involved to justify her contention that depression is endemic to her generation. By turns emotionally powerful and tiresomely solipsistic, her book straddles the line between an absorbing self-portrait and a coy bid for public attention. First serial to Vogue, Esquire and Mouth2Mouth. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
From her first attempted suicide as a 12 year old, Wurtzel records her life as an intellectually gifted but emotionally deprived young woman struggling with clinical depression. She describes her adolescence and her acceptance to Harvard despite a checkered high school career. At the university, she lived constantly on the precipice of a nervous breakdown-and slipped down into the abyss from time to time. Always, she fought back-relying on therapy, drugs (both licit and illicit), friends, and an innate inner strength-and found some salvation in the recognition she received for her writing. Ultimately, treatment with a combination of lithium and prozac allowed her to maintain her stability, but she is unwilling to accept a fate of life-long drug dependence. Graphically written, this book expresses the pain and anger of Wurtzel's unremitting protest against her disability. It will appeal to young readers seeking stories of depression they can relate to. Recommended.Carol R. Glatt, VA Medical Ctr. Lib., PhiladelphiaCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Daphne Merkin
The saddest, funniest, and ultimately, most triumphant book about youthful depression I've come across. It reads like a mixture of J.D. Salinger and Sylvia Plath, with some Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen thrown in for good measure...Elizabeth Wurtzel is one canny and entertaining observer of her generation: If you've been wondering why Kurt Cobain meant what he did - what it feels like to be young, gifted, and black of spirit - this book is the CD, tape, video, and literary answer all in one.
From Booklist
From toddlerhood on, Wurtzel was recognized as bright and gifted. What people didn't know was that by the time she was 11, she was depressed, first overdosing while a kid at summer camp. Her description of life as a depressive is so precise, so filled with the horror, the tedium, and, yes, even the funny moments she experienced on her spiral downward that readers will feel like they're being taken down with her. The title, Prozac Nation, is Wurtzel's term for her generation's collective bad mood. It's a resonant concept, but the notion that Generation X'ers are uniquely susceptible to depressive illnesses does not really take into account the Valium generation and the Miltown generation before that. On the other hand, what does make today's young depressives different from their predecessors is the availability of Prozac and other drugs of its ilk, which work on the brain in new ways and are considered almost miraculous by many who take them. (Wurtzel herself, though skeptical about the drug's long-term effects, is convinced it saved her life.) While the agonizing descriptions of life in shades of black and blue are intensely moving, it's Wurtzel's last chapter, in which she muses on the effects of Prozac both in medical and philosophical terms, that will really get readers thinking. Like Peter Kramer in Listening to Prozac (1993), Wurtzel questions why six million people have felt the need to take the drug. Why, she asks, has depression, once considered a tragic state of mind, now become an utterly commonplace condition? Are doctors overmedicating their unhappy patients, or should Prozac be handed out even more readily? Is the world, in fact, "too difficult to negotiate without some kind of a chemical buffer zone"? Expect lots of talk about this one as the currently depressed, the formerly depressed, and the soon-to-be depressed debate the nagging question of how to feel better. Ilene Cooper
From Kirkus Reviews
A memoir of a depressed, heavily medicated young woman who identifies with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and other tragic figures--and fantasizes about being profiled as a tragic suicide in New York magazine. Born in 1967, Wurtzel grew up in New York City, the precocious only child of divorced parents. At six, she wrote her first book. At the age of 11, she carved up her legs with razor blades in the school bathroom and went to a therapist her parents couldn't afford. But stints at the psychiatrist and summer camp didn't cure Wurtzel of her depression. When she entered Harvard, she spent her days deep in despair or high on Ecstacy or cocaine. By the time she graduated, she was being treated with Prozac and lithium. This is all presented with such narcissistic pride that the following comment about herself is true of the book: ``I was so far gone that I didn't even come across as sad any longer. Just obnoxious.'' She wants to contextualize her experience to give it deeper meaning as some sort of a beacon for her generation. But Wurtzel insists on one-upmanship: She's ``a real sicko,'' while the other six million Americans on Prozac are ``all these happy-pill poppers.'' She wants it both ways: to be at once the Head Loony and a representative voice. But her nihilism offers nothing new (she wails about loneliness and death's inevitability). Her only generational trademark is a preternatural media sensibility. But even her TV- informed peers cringed when she threw a party celebrating her deflowering. By alternately belittling and belaboring her depression, Wurtzel loses her credibility: Either she's a brat who won't shape up or she needs the drugs. Ultimately, you don't care which. An excruciating portrait of, even cause for, depression. This most certainly is not an examination of a generation's collective psyche. (First serial to Vogue, Esquire, and Mouth2Mouth) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From Book News, Inc.
"Full of promise" is how anyone would have described Elizabeth Wurtzel at age ten, a bright-eyed little girl who painted, wrote stories, and excelled in school. By age 12, she was cutting her legs with razor blades, and college turned into a series of breakdowns, crises, and a suicide attempt. Not until being prescribed Prozac, in combination with other psychoactive drugs and therapy, was some stability possible for her. Written with spunk and wit, this is an excellent picture of a young woman's struggle with depression and her view of the dire effects our social and cultural milieu has on the young. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
Buy from Amazon
Compare Prices
|
|
Home
