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Doubleday must have sensed that there was a danger of retailers’ failing to appreciate the title and the jacket image of a topless Wurtzel raising her middle finger. To tone down the package, the author’s nipples were airbrushed out, creating a different kind of fallout. When Entertainment Weekly pressed Wurtzel’s editor, Betsey Lerner, for a comment, Lerner responded, “Elizabeth doesn’t have any nipples.
Lizzie in 1989, just weeks before almost getting stabbed by Ruby
Does Prozac help artists be creative?
Wurtzel’s book has not aged well – it is stuck in the 90s, po-faced and narcissistic. It lacks the note of authenticity that characterises the best books about mental illness. Wurtzel is also unsure exactly how she feels about the drug. At one point she gushes, “Prozac was the miracle that saved my life.” Several pages later, though, she admits that “the secret I sometimes think that only I know is that Prozac really isn’t that great”.
Wow, can’t it be both? Also, can’t it be a perfect picture of the 90s instead of stuck in the 90s? These haters need to check out some Zoloft.
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The truth is that her success so far has been largely down to her refusal to subscribe to any narrative of addiction, to cast herself either as someone in recovery (‘That’s the boring part. I think you want the black magic’) or as a victim looking back on the ways her life went astray (‘I don’t want to be [the confessional writer] Elizabeth Wurtzel’).
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It gets worse. One of Wallace’s most difficult and complicated stories, “The Depressed Person,” was ‘revenge fiction. It was his way of getting even with Elizabeth Wurtzel for treating him as a statue (or, as she would say, refusing to have sex with him). Freed from desire, he now saw that her love of the spotlight was just ordinary self-absorption.’
Apr. 8, 2013 at 9:01pm with 106 notes
Reblogged from deathtothememories
