Reviews

From her first attempted suicide as a 12 year old, Wurtzel records her life as an intellectually gifted but emotionally deprived young woman struggling with clinical depression. She describes her adolescence and her acceptance to Harvard despite a checkered high school career. At the university, she lived constantly on the precipice of a nervous breakdown-and slipped down into the abyss from time to time. Always, she fought back-relying on therapy, drugs (both licit and illicit), friends, and an innate inner strength-and found some salvation in the recognition she received for her writing. Ultimately, treatment with a combination of lithium and prozac allowed her to maintain her stability, but she is unwilling to accept a fate of life-long drug dependence. Graphically written, this book expresses the pain and anger of Wurtzel's unremitting protest against her disability. It will appeal to young readers seeking stories of depression they can relate to. Recommended.-Carol R. Glatt, VA Medical Ctr. Lib., Philadelphia

Twenty-six-year-old Wurtzel, a former critic of popular music for New York and the New Yorker, recounts in this luridly intimate memoir the 10 years of chronic, debilitating depression that preceded her treatment with Prozac in 1990. After her parents' acrimonious divorce, Wurtzel was raised by her mother on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The onset of puberty, she recalls, also marked the onset of recurrent bouts of acute depression, sending her spiraling into episodes of catatonic despair, masochism and hysterical crying. Here she unsparingly details her therapists, hospitalizations, binges of sex and drug use and the paralyzing spells of depression which afflicted her in high school and as a Harvard undergraduate and culminated in a suicide attempt and ultimate diagnosis of atypical depression, a severe, episodic psychological disorder. The title is misleading, for Wurtzel skimps on sociological analysis and remains too self-involved to justify her contention that depression is endemic to her generation. By turns emotionally powerful and tiresomely solipsistic, her book straddles the line between an absorbing self-portrait and a coy bid for public attention. First serial to Vogue, Esquire and Mouth2Mouth. (Sept.)

"Wrenching and comical, self-indulgent and self-aware, Prozac Nation possesses the raw candor of Joan Didion''s essays, the irritating emotional exhibitionism of Sylvia Plath''s The Bell Jar, and the wry, dark humor of a Bob Dylan song."—The New York Times



"[Wurtzel] is smart, she is funny...she is thoughtful and...she is very, very brave. Wurtzel portrays, from the inside out, an emotional life perpetually spent outrunning the relentless pursuit of what she describes as a black wave, often sacrificing her likability on the altar of her truth."—Vanity Fair



"A very important book, particularly to the countless number of people who aren''t sure what''s wrong with them but are suffering from the negative thinking, erratic behavior, and dark moods associated with clinical depression. A powerful self-portrait...well worth reading"—San Francisco Bay Guardian



"The saddest, funniest, and ultimately, most triumphant book about youthful depression I''ve come across. It reads like a mixture of J.D. Salinger and Sylvia Plath, with some Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen thrown in for good measure...[Wurtzel] is one canny and entertaining observer of her generation: if you''ve been wondering why Kurt Cobain meant what he did—what it feels like to be young, gifted, and black of spirit—this book is the CD, tape, video, and literary answer all in one."—Daphne Merkin, author of Enchantment



"A very good book, maybe even an important one, and the pain and despair Wurtzel describes are as real as they are excruciatingly rendered."—Mademoiselle