The good girl, growing vaguely ashamed, plays at being a bad girl, experimenting with self-mutilation. Elizabeth is a cheerful, eager student-even a prodigy. “I got two parents who were endlessly at odds with each other, and all they gave me was an empty foundation that split down the middle of my empty, anguished self.” Her footloose father leaves little Elizabeth with her buttoned-up, Republican mother and goes on his merry way, rarely to be seen afterward. The language is exaggerated, stretched with adjectival filler. The long moan begins with Wurtzel’s parents, who split when she was 2. Like a college student wondering aloud about how much she can drink and still get A’s, Wurtzel regards her emotional destitution as something of a marvel. Depression is not so much described as used-to garner sympathy and admiration.

We’re encouraged to view Wurtzel’s woes as symptomatic: as a possible Newsweek feature story first and an autobiography second.īut for all Prozac Nation’s gestures toward the generational, it’s really a work of singular self-absorption, and its pain-however real it may have been in life-often seems fake on the page. With more than a hint of grandiose self-pity (and some MTV-style marketing savvy), it strives to position its author as a poster child for a putative bluesy youthquake, pretending to offer us not just the memoir of one woman’s early sorrows but a newsworthy generational complaint. Even the title of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America sounds like an excuse.

Prozac nation book review