God, I’m going to miss Elizabeth Wurtzel so much. So fucking much.
The first time I read Prozac Nation, I was 17. I was an uptight, depressed, lonesome high school senior in rural Ohio. I don’t remember how I picked up her book; I probably stumbled across it in a bookstore near the Ohio State campus, a few dozen blocks away from my Catholic school.
Honestly, two things probably drew me to it: her portrait on the cover, and the subtitle: “Young and Depressed in America”. Even now, as I gaze at her portrait above, Elizabeth’s eyes were arrestingly expressive: windows into her piercingly honest, tormented self.
But the book…the book was a fucking revelation. At 17, I was too young, too immature to really get it, though. It wasn’t until I re-read it nearly a decade-and-a-half later, that it truly started to sink in; and then, when I read it again a third time two years ago, that her bracing candor about herself destroyed me again.
Reading Prozac Nation, I was thunderstruck by the idea that you could suffer from depression, be suicidal, be hospitalized, and still be yourself, be successful, be able to unapologetically, honestly be in the world. That didn’t square with what I’d been told by my parents, or the therapists I’d been seeing, all of whom insisted on fixing either some or all of me. In Elizabeth Wurtzel, writing about herself, I saw another way of being in the world, one that embraced honesty about the world and about one’s self.
I wasn’t ready for that then; in truth, I’ve only recently in the last decade become ready for it. But she showed me how, there, then, and now.
Honesty: there’s that word again. Elizabeth was probably the first woman I saw who wasn’t afraid to just exist as herself, with all the messiness and loudness and vivacity and intensity that it takes to just be in the world. And if it was possible to fall in love with someone through their words, then I fell for Elizabeth. She wasn’t the last author for whose words I fell, but she was the first, and that’s what matters.
I never knew her personally - I only met her in passing in 2012, long enough to tell her I’d loved both Prozac Nation and Bitch, but it was a book party for someone else for whom I was flacking, and I regret that I didn’t take more time to spend with her. But even so, to me she illuminated that party. But even just having that briefest of moments, I cannot help but call her by her first name, because her writing invited you to consider her a friend.
Luminous: that’s another way to describe her, I suppose. Or rather: incandescent, because she lit the world with the tempestuous fire of her prose. Prozac Nation was the first book I read that I felt described my depression with the full hurricane force of how I felt. It walloped me in the gut: at last, at long fucking last, someone knows exactly how I feel. But I was barely more than a child, so it wouldn’t be until I picked it up again in late 2007, dredging the wreckage of my divorce, among other things, that more of it resonated; and then again, when I was alone again, two years ago.
I knew she was struggling with cancer. Generally, as a two-time cancer survivor, I hate the idea that people “fight” cancer, because I feel it misunderstands the nature of the disease — but if anyone ever fought cancer, it was Elizabeth. Read this fiercely harrowing essay she wrote, and you’ll see what I mean.
And now I have advanced breast cancer.
Cue the sorries.
Seriously?
Sorry for what?
I’m not sorry about anything. I was never sorry when I said I was. Apologies are a courtesy.
I love to argue. I am in it for the headache.
I don’t need you to be on my side – I’m on my side.
Everyone is entitled to my opinion.
I love being controversial, because that’s the closest you get to everyone agreeing with you – the other choice is no one is paying attention.
I hate anodyne. I hate that word.
I am worse than cancer. And now I have cancer. All anyone can do is forgive me. Which is exactly what they have been doing all along.
Even so: when I learned Tuesday that she’d died from fucking cancer, at 52, I had to duck into a windowless conference room, take my glasses off, and cry for a long minute or three. I simply could not believe it. I couldn’t grok that Elizabeth was no longer among we, the living. I am not remotely ready for her to be gone, just like a snap of the fingers, once struck.
We should all live more like Elizabeth: alive, volcanic, willing to be messy and honest, tangled, slapdash, complex, and intricate, in all the wonderful chaos and clutter of life. She gave me the gift of showing me how to embrace myself for who I am, and who I could be, because of who I am, in all my messiness and complicatedness and scruffiness and rough edges, and I’ll be forever grateful for that. So it’s fitting I let Elizabeth close it out, in her inimitable way. We should all be so fortunate as to write our own elegies:
What matters more in this crazy world?”
Love each other. Know that I love you because of who you are, however messy and complicated and tangled-up you might be. And just fucking live for you. Don’t be anodyne.