Word: wurtzel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...cover of Prozac Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel's 1994 memoir of her struggle with depression, the author, then 26, posed strung out and exposing her midriff. The book sold well and established Wurtzel as a hipster social critic even though it dealt entirely with the subject of herself. Now, looking more self-possessed, Wurtzel graces the cover of her second book topless and giving the finger. Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (Doubleday; 434 pages; $23.95) is, more or less, a meandering lamentation on the fate of irrepressible women, those too angry, too tormented, too selfish--those who, say, would prefer...
...postfeminists Camille Paglia and Katie Roiphe have tried to persuade us that a woman's power lies in her sexuality, Wurtzel wants to inform those perhaps unfamiliar with the basic tenets of the women's movement that it isn't always thus. From Delilah to Anne Sexton to '70s supermodel Gia, she reminds us, seductive, complicated women haven't had an easy time...
Fortunately for Wurtzel, her book comes out at a moment when the culture seems painfully devoid of commanding female troublemakers. Courtney Love is now a chic model/actress, and Sharon Stone has married, in a big peony of a dress, a newspaper boss. We have no brazenly rapacious Barbara Stanwycks or Bette Davises; instead we have Monica Lewinskys and Ally McBeals, women just insecure and pesty. On the bright side, no one will ever make a career out of doing Calista Flockhart in drag...
HARVARD STUDENTS JUST CAN'T get enough of anti-depressants, either from UHS or in their own artistic pursuits. First there was Elizabeth Wurtzel '88 and her best-seller Prozac Nation. Then, last spring, Jen Cox '95 made a film based on a similar theme which has since been screening at art houses in the area. Now, Zoe Sarnat '97 has written and directed a cool nightmare entitled "WASTED!," which deals with a group of medicated patients at a recovery center. What is refreshing about Sarnat's take is how she stays away from self-serving philosophizing and lofty judgments...
Unlike Roiphe and Wurtzel, Stone has taken a long, healthy break from Harvard since she graduated from Adams House in 1985. She steered clear of both the sheltered world of academia and of the Manhattan rat-race, sucking up to few trends and pandering to no one. She had no real tunnel vision of her career; she only knew that when she graduated from Harvard she wanted to live in Latin America and/or be involved with filmmaking. Neither of those followed directly from her academic work at Harvard: she concentrated in social studies and wrote her thesis on working women...