Elizabeth Wurtzel Was the Writer I'd Wished I Was - Daily Beast

We all wanted to be Elizabeth Wurtzel until we didn’t.

I remember the barbed wire surrounded the soft photo of her on the cover of of Prozac Nation. I remember studying her face, her poses, her listless beauty, her skinny arms. She was a weird poet-angel of the mid-1990s pre-apocalypse. She had come to tell us of her depressed teens in a way no one had before. She told stories of her misspent youth, her time at Harvard, her parents’ divorce, and her complicated relationship with her mother. The year was 1994, I was a charming but mildly bulimic 15-year-old. I hated life and wanted to die too. I even took Prozac. I didn’t understand why I wasn’t on the cover of a bestselling book. I read her book, pored over its pages, said things to myself like “I could write that,” but I knew I actually couldn’t. She made it look easy in a way that memoir writing actually isn’t.

I met Elizabeth, when I was older and no longer wanted to be her, but here’s the thing: I still sort of wanted to be Elizabeth even when I knew better. Because Elizabeth was brave in a way I never was. She was also able to convince herself that the world wanted to read multiple memoirs about her. She was earnest in a way I wasn’t capable of being. But she was also messy, profoundly messy in a way that I actually was deep inside. Elizabeth was the girl who told you how she felt and said it loud for the people in the back. She once told me why she took off her shirt on the cover of her second book, Bitch,  “Because I could.” 

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Elizabeth Wurtzel Was the Writer I'd Wished I Was - Daily Beast
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