Elizabeth Wurtzel RIP

Back before social media, before the age of over sharing was in full swing, before people like Lena Dunham and the Kardashians turned their lives and bodies and vanity into TV shows and multi-million dollar enterprises, Elizabeth Wurtzel led the way with simple prose.

When she published her memoir Prozac Nation in 1994, still in her late 20s, it was controversial and shocking. She wrote in raw and unsparing detail about her depression, drug use, self-mutilation, and personal life in ways that made readers and critics uncomfortable. She made the TMI, warts-and-all, too-soon-in-life memoir a trendy before it was trendy. 

Elizabeth broke a particular mold.

She was a native of the Upper West Side, wrote more confessional books and articles in the years after Prozac Nation, and also worked as a lawyer. She has just died at the age of 52. Despite a life full of drugs and depression, she died from cancer (not an overdose or suicide) so her passing in this way is particularly poignant.  

I never read the book that made her famous but I read her later book, Bitch, about angry, unashamed, out-spoken women. It was angry, funny, brutal, and unapologetic. Published in 1998, it was, in retrospect, well ahead of its time.

Real trailblazers are rarely appreciated in their own era, and Elizabeth Wurtzel certainly was one.

RIP