伊丽莎白·沃策尔

伊丽莎白·沃策尔（1967年7月31日 - 2020年1月7日）是一位美国作家、记者和律师，她是《百忧解国家：青春与抑郁在美国》（Prozac Nation:Young and De⁃pressed in America）的作者， 她在书中记录了自己的抑郁症，后因乳腺癌去世。

Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel (July 31, 1967 – January 7, 2020) was an American writer, journalist, and lawyer known for the confessional memoir Prozac Nation, which she published at the age of 27. Her work often focused on chronicling her personal struggles with depression, addiction, career, and relationships. Wurtzel's work drove a boom in confessional writing and the personal memoir genre during the 1990s, and she was viewed as a voice of Generation X. In her later life, Wurtzel worked briefly as an attorney before her death from breast cancer.

Early life

Wurtzel grew up in a Jewish family on the Upper West Side of New York City and attended the Ramaz School. Her parents, Lynne Winters and Donald Wurtzel, divorced when she was young, and Wurtzel was primarily raised by her mother, who worked in publishing and as a media consultant. In a 2018 article in The Cut, Wurtzel wrote that she discovered in 2016 that her biological father was photographer Bob Adelman, who had worked with her mother in the 1960s.

As described in her memoir Prozac Nation, Wurtzel's depression began between the ages of 10 and 12. Wurtzel admitted to cutting herself when she was in adolescence, and of spending her teenage years in an environment of emotional angst, substance misuse, bad relationships, and frequent fights with family members. A gifted student with family wealth, Wurtzel went on to attend Harvard College, where she continued to struggle with depression and substance abuse.

Early career

While an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1980s, Wurtzel wrote for The Harvard Crimson and received the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award for a piece about Lou Reed. She also interned at The Dallas Morning News, but was fired after being accused of plagiarism. She received a B.A. degree in comparative literature from Harvard in 1989.

Wurtzel subsequently moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and found work as a pop music critic for The New Yorker and New York Magazine. The New York Times book critic Ken Tucker characterized her contributions to the former publication as "unintentionally hilarious." In 1997 Dwight Garner wrote in Salon.com that her column "was so roundly despised that I sometimes felt like its only friend in the world."

Prozac Nation

Wurtzel was best known for her best-selling memoir Prozac Nation (1994), published when she was 27. The book chronicles her battle with depression as a college undergraduate and her eventual treatment with the medication Prozac. Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times, "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 paperback was a New York Times bestseller. The film adaptation, which starred Christina Ricci, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2001. The book is credited with launching the feminist disability memoir genre and with it Wurtzel was said to become "one of the first memoirists to write honestly and brutally about depression and addiction."

Bitch

Wurtzel's next book was titled Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1998). In The New York Times, Karen Lehrman wrote that while Bitch "is full of enormous contradictions, bizarre digressions and illogical outbursts, it is also one of the more honest, insightful and witty books on the subject of women to have come along in a while."