Elizabeth Wurtzel

This news is from a week ago, but I am just learning about this tonight and I am heartbroken.

Author Elizabeth Wurtzel died at age 52 on Tuesday January 7, 2020 in Manhattan. David Samuels, who was a close friend of Wurtzel, said that metastatic breast cancer was the cause.

In 1994 Wurtzel made waves when her debut book "Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America" hit bookshelves. The explosive memoir addressed clinical depression, helped to start a conversation about mental health and introduced a confessional style of writing that is still popular today.

Critics were divided over the book, which described Wurtzel's time at Harvard, her drug use and sexual exploits. Her follow up book was called "Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women" which was released in 1998, and quickly became controversial due to the cover in which Wurtzel posed topless with her middle finger up. In 2002, she published "More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction" which detailed her abuse of cocaine and Ritalin. In 2013 she wrote in a New York Times essay that she "made a career out of her emotions."

In an afterword that was added to Prozac Nation in 1995 Elizabeth Wurtzel said this about her hopes for the book:

"If Prozac Nation has any particular purpose, it would be to come out and say that clinical depression is a real problem, that ruins lives, that ends lives, that it very nearly ended my life; that it affects many, many people, many very bright and worthy and thoughtful and caring people, people who could probably save the world or at the very least do it some real good, people who are too mired in despair to even begin to unleash the life spring of potential that they likely have deep down inside."

I cried as I typed out that quote. It's really beautiful and real and heartbreaking.

If you have never read "Prozac Nation" I urge you to get your hands on a copy immediately and devour it. It's truly a gorgeous book.

Goodbye Elizabeth Wurtzel. You were a true treasure and you voice will be missed.