| In Memoriam-Elizabeth Wurtzel Elizabeth Wurtzel whose 1994 memoir, Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, "won praise for opening a dialogue about clinical depression and helped introduce an unsparing style of confessional writing that remains influential," died January 7, the New York Times reported. She was 52. Writer David Samuels, a friend since childhood, said the cause was metastatic breast cancer. After her diagnosis, Wurtzel became an advocate for BRCA testing-something she had not had-and wrote about her cancer experience. Writing about her final illness was a natural choice for Wurtzel, "who had for a quarter-century scrutinized her life in relentless detail, becoming a hero to some, especially to many women of her generation and younger, but also drawing scorn," the Times noted. "Lizzie's literary genius rests not just in her acres of quotable one-liners," Samuels said, "but in her invention of what was really a new form, which has more or less replaced literary fiction-the memoir by a young person no one has ever heard of before. It was a form that Lizzie fashioned in her own image, because she always needed to be both the character and the author." Check out her titles here. |
