Word: wurtzel
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...this makes depression look pretty good. Sure, the author was a miserable wreck, but she really lived. Throughout the book, Wurtzel mediates uncomfortably between depression as a political statement whose amelioration through pharmaceuticals is ignoble escapism, and depression as a chemical illness which should be treated medically. In an interview included in her book's press packet, she says that when she looks back on her days of depression. "I see myself as more pure, more raw, more instinctive, more in touch with all the evil of the world, more emotional and more attuned." She cites a New Yorker cartoon...
...Wurtzel herself has been on Prozac for years: she started taking it in 1990, when it was first being distributed. In her case, she said during a reading and question-and-answer session in the Adams House Senior Common Room last Sunday, it was that or eventual suicide, as she suffers from Atypical Depression, or Dysthymia That Wurtzel's brand of depression has a clinical name confers it a medical validity that complicates what seems to be the point of her book, which is that in this society any aware person should be depressed. During her appearance in Adams, Wurtzel...
...meant to reflect a condition in which many of us privileged college students find ourselves, if it's supposed to provoke the realization that we're not alone in our misery, what about those of us who are really bummed out, but not "Atypically Depressed"? In that case, Wurtzel seems to suggest, it would be wrong to seek relief in anti-depressants, as they would take the edge off our disgust with this cruel world...
Inasmuch as Prozac Nation sets out to make broad or generalizable points about the nature of society, the family, youth culture, politics, or whatever, it fails roundly. As the memoir of Wurtzel's troubled coming of age it might have some sort of appeal, if only a prurient and very limited one, especially to those familiar with the Harvard-specific sites of her antics. But even the interest that inheres in a peer's extravagances is undercut by the fact that Wurtzel is neither a good writer nor an appealing individual. She comes off as an irritating, solipsistic brat. Wurtzel...
There is also something shocking about this book, though not in a titillating way. The intimate tone in which Wurtzel narrates sordid detail after humiliating incident after debasing sexual encounter is almost obscenely exhibitionistic, even for our culture of confession, especially since it serves no purpose other than alternately to bore us and make us squirm. Perhaps it's meant to be inspirational--Wurtzel did a lot of crazy stuff, but she pulled through and she's not ashamed--but instead it's pathetic. Most of us will have to swallow a lot of Prozac before we're able...