Prozac Nation: A Memoir. - book reviews

USUALLY WHEN a book is published by an obscure author and subsequently judged to be bad, it is allowed to pass unmolested by critics through its brief stay on book-store shelves, after which it travels to the book crematoria to be recycled. Elizabeth Wurtzel's excellent first book--a memoir of depression called Prozac Nation--might have ended up unnoticed except as kleenex. But an odd thing happened.

You've never heard of Miss Wurtzel. She is 27 and looks, in her back-flap photo, like a more zaftig version of Kate Moss. She worked briefly as a rock critic for The New Yorker and New York magazine, but apart from that was perfectly obscure. Nevertheless, around September 1, the nation's great news publications began lining up to execute her by journalistic firing squad. The New York Times Book Review, Newsweek, her former employers at New York, The Village Voice--each deployed a prominent review devoted to trashing Miss Wurtzel's book in the nastiest and most personal terms available: "it's pain ... often seems fake," "long moan," "sorrowful arias," "exaggerated," "almost unbearable," "grandiose self-pity," "singular self-absorption," "self-obsessed case study"--and that's just New York magazine.

What really is bothering these guys, with their impressive ability to come up with one synonym after another for egotism?

Of course there is something inherently egotistical about a 27-year-old writing her memoris. However, until she began taking the antidepressant Prozac, Miss Wurtzel's life really was about as harrowing as it could be--given that she is a middle-class New Yorker who went to private schools, then Harvard, followed by a succession of apparently effortless swings upward from plumb newspaper job to plumb magazine job to plumb book contract.

Is depression "bigger than a breadbox?" Miss Wurtzel wants to know, "smaller than an armoire?" As described here, her own bout with the condition strikes around the onset of puberty. At a posh summer camp, she intentionally overdoses on allergy medicine. From there on, "black waves" of depression pursue her. At lunch time in intermediate school, she retreats to the girls' locker room, amusing herself by drawing lines of blood from her legs with a razor blade:

I did not, you see, want to kill myself. Not

at that time, anyway. But I wanted to

know that if need be, if the desperation

got so terribly bad, I could inflict harm on

my body.... I tried out different

shapes--squares, triangles, pentagons,

even an awkwardly carved heart, with a

stab would at its center, wanting to see if

it hurt the way a real broken heart could

hurt. I was amazed and pleased to find

that it didn't.

In college, Miss Wurtzel is consumed by thoughts of suicide. One day she enthusiastically describes to her psychiatrist how, in her frequent fantasies, she would take her own life: "I would get into a steaming hot bath in the dark, because in the dark you can't see what you are doing to yourself so you can't get scared and you can't scream, and I would slash my wrists and maybe a couple of arteries." The doctor, alarmed, insists they drive over right that minute to the college infirmary--where Miss Wurtzel has already spent many nights under the influence of depressive symptoms. The girl agrees, but before leaving she locks herself in the bathroom and stuffs her mouth with Mellaril tablets, a powerful sedative--in a suicide attempt which eventually fails when Miss Wurtzel's digestive system rebels on its own initiative, making the old stomach-pump cure unnecessary.

Is Miss Wurtzel self-obsessed? Fifty years ago, if you were an unhappy young writer like she is--and you wanted to publicize you views about your city, your country, yourself as a representative citizen of either--you would write a novel. Today, you write your memoirs. We are used to new writers writing intensely about themselves, so the objection to her egotism doesn't stand up.

A woman very much of her times, attempting to get at the meaning of clinical depression both to herself and to the young Americans among whom it is the characteristic mental disturbance in the way neuresthenia was among affluent Victorians, Elizabeth Wurtzel has told her story in devastatingly clear prose, whose self-deprecating wit undercuts any danger that she'll annoy the hell out of us by telling too damn much about herself. So perhaps, more than any "grandiose self-pity," it is Miss Wurtzel's views that are the cause of all that hostility. For what goes unreported in the attack reviews is that Prozac Nation is less about Prozac than it is about another contemporary phenomenon: divorce.

Miss Wurtzel's parents split up two decades ago, but she still describes the event with a sadness that can break your heart. Visiting with her father and his new live-in girlfriend, Miss Wurtzel recalls (in italics, I'm not sure why): "when it was time for me to go to sleep, I would make my father leave [his] shoes, rusty brown half boots, in the hallway outside my bedroom door. I wanted them to be there so I could look out and know he was still there. It was like I knew he was planning to disappear on me"--which he eventually did.