Published in 2014 (first published 1994)
388 pages
Brought up Jewish, Elizabeth Wurtzel‘s parents divorced when she was young. As described in Prozac Nation, Wurtzel’s depression began at the ages of ten to twelve. She attended Ramaz for high school and was described as an overachiever by her teachers, who expected her to become a nationally famous writer. While an undergraduate at Harvard College, she wrote for The Harvard Crimson and the Dallas Morning News. Wurtzel also received the 1986 Rolling Stone Magazine College Journalism Award. Following her graduation, Wurtzel moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and found work as pop music critic for The New Yorker and New York Magazine. Elizabeth Wurtzel died on January 7, 2020, from complications due to cancer. She was fifty-two at the time of her death.
What is this book about?
Elizabeth Wurtzel’s New York Times best-selling memoir, with a new afterword
“Sparkling, luminescent prose . . . A powerful portrait of one girl’s journey through the purgatory of depression and back.” —New York Times
“A book that became a cultural touchstone.” —New Yorker
Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger on the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. Her famous memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era for readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
