“I was so far gone that I didn’t even come across as sad any longer,” she wrote. In 1994, aged 27, she became famous with her memoir Prozac Nation, which explored how her experience with depression compared with “all these happy-pill poppers” across the US, while also exposing the worst of her own behaviour.

She also began working in journalism: she was fired as an intern from the Dallas Morning News in 1988 when she was accused of plagiarism, but later found work as a music critic at the New Yorker. While at Harvard, she self-medicated with ecstasy and cocaine, then began taking Prozac and lithium. She began going to therapy at the age of 11 after she self-harmed in a school bathroom, then spent her teen years alternating between trips to the psychiatrist and summer camps as her parents searched for a cure to her depression. I miss her.”īorn in 1967, Wurtzel grew up as an only child in New York City and wrote her first book aged six. We were both misfits and she was kind and generous and filled spaces that might have otherwise been lonely with her warmth and humor and idiosyncratic voice. She started mid-career as I was starting young. Journalist Ronan Farrow, who studied law with Wurtzel at Yale when she went back to school in 2004, wrote on Twitter: “I met Lizzie in law school. On Tuesday, authors, editors and journalists around the world paid tribute to Wurtzel and her early influence on confessional writing, which would become ubiquitous with the birth of the internet.

Prozac nation book review