Prozac Nation

Prozac Nation

Elizabeth Wurtzel

From Publishers Weekly

Twenty-six-year-old Wurtzel, a former critic of popular music for New York and the New Yorker, recounts in this luridly intimate memoir the 10 years of chronic, debilitating depression that preceded her treatment with Prozac in 1990. After her parents’ acrimonious divorce, Wurtzel was raised by her mother on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The onset of puberty, she recalls, also marked the onset of recurrent bouts of acute depression, sending her spiraling into episodes of catatonic despair, masochism and hysterical crying. Here she unsparingly details her therapists, hospitalizations, binges of sex and drug use and the paralyzing spells of depression which afflicted her in high school and as a Harvard undergraduate and culminated in a suicide attempt and ultimate diagnosis of atypical depression, a severe, episodic psychological disorder. The title is misleading, for Wurtzel skimps on sociological analysis and remains too self-involved to justify her contention that depression is endemic to her generation. By turns emotionally powerful and tiresomely solipsistic, her book straddles the line between an absorbing self-portrait and a coy bid for public attention.

Prozac Nation trailer (2001):

Prozac Nation - In the press

Elizabeth Wurtzel, the Nineties’ Lena Dunham who wrote about her depression in Prozac Nation, is now ...

Prozac Nation - Reviews

[Wurtzel] is smart, she is funny…she is thoughtful and…she is very, very brave. Wurtzel portrays, from the inside out, an emotional life perpetually spent outrunning the relentless purs...

Vanity Fair

Wrenching and comical, self-indulgent and self-aware, ‘Prozac Nation’ possesses the raw candor of Joan Didion’s essays, the irritating emotional exhibitionism of Sylvia Plath̵...

The New York Times