Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America

4.5 stars. I see a bunch of 2/3 star ratings and I can understand why; this was an uncomfortable read. Wurtzel drones on and on about hating her (pretty privileged) life while also somehow maintaining an air of superiority and constantly reminding the reader that she’s not like other girls. I can totally see why a lot of people would be turned off by this book, and I myself even had moments where I was turned off. All in all though, I loved it. I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed this as much if I hadn’t had my own struggles with depression, but I found it to be raw and honest. Depressed people often do shitty things because they feel shitty. They’re not always suffering in silence like brave tortured souls; sometimes (a lot of the time) they’re mean, frustrating, selfish, and downright intolerable. I really liked how she didn’t sugarcoat any of that. I think if you’ve struggled with severe depression (esp if you’re a woman), you should read this. If you haven’t, you probably will find it to be annoying and hard to get through, but I’d honestly suggest to give it a try anyway; if for nothing less than Wurtzel’s amazing storytelling ability.

DNF

I didn't feel like this book captured what it's like to be depressed. Having depression myself, I can understand the self-worth and meaning of the life that comes with it, but Wurtzel's version of it is narcissistic and selfish. She is whiny and expects everyone in her life to care only for her. She doesn't appreciate anything her parents or other people around her do for her. I got through +/-100 pages and just couldn't anymore. I'm kind of mad at her because she's pushing everyone away and saying no one is helping me, well if you won't accept it - how you will get it?
I doubt this book can help for people who are looking for an answers or learning "what depressed person feels like" there's not a lot of thing to learn from the memoir.

most important thought: the author did an amazing job describing her depression. i was constantly underlining sentences and tabbing pages. i am extremely grateful to have read her memoir. this book was a very important and helpful read for me.

less important in light of aforementioned praise, but still frustrating: what's up with the name of the book and the first chapter? she's framing the book like it's going to be all anti-drug, and about the failure of the system or such, but then really it's just the story of her illness up until the point that she goes on prozac. it's a very ambiguous set of messages. the first chapter just seems way out of place; if it was going to be included at all, it would have been more appropriate as an epilogue with some sort of conclusion at the end. very weird--feels kind of deceptive. i really get the impression that the book's title was intended to draw in readers rather than convey anything about the essence of the book. and i'm wondering if the 'new' afterword by the author is her attempt to counteract the title. her afterword talks about all the hype and controversey about prozac, and about her and others' concern that prozac is being trivialized and that depression is being trivialized due to criticism of prozac...but as far as i can tell her book title is feeding into that. wtf?

A book for all Seasons: book I can identify with

"How can you hide from what never goes away?"-Heraclitus

INCREÍBLE !!!!!!!! una canción de mitski librificada, the bell jar moderno ! disfruté tanto tanto tanto este libro, me identifiqué muchísimo con la protagonista y con algunos patrones en común en nuestro pensamiento que ambas tenemos relacionados a nuestra depresión. también me recuerda mucho a toda la poesía de rosario castellanos, sobre todo ese sentimiento de desesperanza por sentir que nadie te entiende y de anhelo por algo mejor. creo que una cita del libro que engloba estos sentimientos y que, de alguna manera, siento q nos une a rosario castellanos, elizabeth wurtzel, sylvia plath, yo a y muchas otras mujeres !!! es la siguiente:

"In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr. Sterling was right about that. I loved it because it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence was my agony".

(postdata no romanticen las enfermedades mentales en grandes escritoras _ni en ustedes mismas_

I'm conflicted. "Prozac Nation" is probably one of the truest accounts of someone with chronic major depression that I've ever read. It's dark, it's full of self-loathing, and it's narcissistic. The problem with a straight account of chronic major depression is that it's likely to be extremely annoying to read for the mentally healthy. So authentic is the writing that it makes the reader feel a sample of what it is actually like to be with a person who is chronically depressed for a period of time. Most people leave out of frustration. I'm afraid that the same could be said about reading this memoir.

Thoughts on the ending: After reading this book, it's easy to see that Elizabeth Wurtzel is obviously intelligent and, despite coming from a broken home, fairly well-off financially. She's also fundamentally broken emotionally from start to finish. If you're looking for her mental state to progress, you will be disappointed. There is no happy ending. Elizabeth's greatest accomplishment is that she is alive. Her life isn't any better at the end than at the beginning. It's this point that is the hardest to read. It's unsatisfying. The ending is abrupt. But it's also real. This is a real person in this book. Real life is often cruel and unsatisfying.

I read a lot of Wurtzel’s later work after her death and thought a lot of it was great. This, not so much.

It has its moments and I can see some ways where it blazes a trail, but it’s often oversaturated with repetitive descriptions of hopelessness and reconstituted conversations that don’t sound believable. Pain is difficult to describe and she manages in flashes but after awhile it became rote.

There are also random serious details thrown in that distract and detract for me: like when she’s 19 or 20 and misses lunch with her grandparents and declares that they practically raised her when they haven’t been mentioned at all in the preceding 150 pages detailing her life until that point. Instances like that made some other claims seem spurious.

She can write, but I was often bored. I’ll still give her next book, Bitch, a try, though.

This review is a complete ramble, and an unedited one at that.

This book was an utter trip to read, to digest, and to reflect on. Elizabeth Wurtzel's tale is often criticized, I've noticed, for being seemingly dishonest and/or blatantly, and wholly self-absorbed. This novel is one about Wurtzel's experience living with depression and mental health issues that started from the early age of 11 years old. This is an autobiographical novel about Wurtzel's depression but, perhaps even more than that, it is a novel about a disturbed generation with divorced, Boomer parents in the United States of America. Is about a societal hiccup, spit-up, and (arguably) a decline.

There is reason for readers to feel an annoyance towards Wurtzel's words and personal recounts; an annoyance I felt oftentimes as well, towards the end of the novel, when certain descriptions of misery and emptiness felt like it was being dragged out -- not the recounting of the experiences themselves, but the imagery and the metaphors which made Wurtzel's depression, for most of the novel, a tangible thing for the reader to acknowledge. However, I wondered, in the beginning of the novel if that was a necessary attribute to the book: its excessive descriptions. Especially since in the beginning of the novel, I greatly valued those descriptions despite also questioning them. Throughout the novel, I questioned Wurtzel's way of describing herself. Oftentimes, I felt I should have had the impression that she was being self-important, self-absorbed, conceited, also. With the way she described her younger self as, ultimately "better" than the other kids -- more intelligent and insightful, etc.. Perhaps she was, but while I questioned those impressions, I did not address them with the annoyance I might've, had Wurtzel not written her book so well. These descriptions were how Wurtzel felt at the time, and I don't think her writing or depression can be truly observed as self-absorbed, but rather self-aware. She is too self-aware for me to think of her as self-absorbed. The way she writes about her feelings of failure about her mother, the way she writes her own narrations of desperation for others to help her, and their narrations of how tired they are and how poorly she has treated them. Wurtzel doesn't hide the person she became as a depressed girl, and then a depressed woman. She presents the people in her life that either tried to help her or mistrated her completely, as objectively as a human and an autobiography can offer these characters, and she reflected on their roles in her life. She acknowledged her mistreatment of those people, and their mistreatment of her, respectively. She told everything as it was, sympathetically -- towards herself and towards them. What's more, is that this novel is not about Prozac Elizabeth it's about Prozac Nation. Elizabeth Wurtzel did not write this novel so much for herself as she did for her generation, and for those of us who struggle with severe mental illness too.

And I think her novel successfully communicates what she was aiming for, and I think what she was aiming for was commendable. I do not think Elizabeth Wurtzel exaggerated her mental illness or was dishonest about its severity at all, as some of the reviews I have read on Goodreads may suggest. While they provide reason to suspect some dishonestly, I can't imagine that the tales and descriptions that make this book so successful and whole, can possibly be written by a "fake depressive" or whatever, simply because I have never before read descriptions of depression and self destruction, mostly, as "perfectly" as Wurtzel had in this book. I have never before read such a relatable description of the self-destructive drive. So much detail, accurate detail, details which resonated with me, and details which resonated with so many other people in a variety of ways, and I can't believe that anyone would be able to fabricate that. Not even a genius.

This novel isn't perfect. It is mildly, arguably more than mildly, convoluted a lot of the time, and there is something missing from its pages which I can't yet seem to identify. I also simultaneously appreciated the creative and cultural allusions of the novel, as well as found them a bit overboard sometimes. However, I also believe that Prozac Nation is an important novel and that its conclusion, is enlightening to the romanticism and ongoing "trends" surrounding mental illness that have only gotten worse from the time Wurtzel wrote her novel to now. I think that Prozac Nation encourages and inspires us to look at society's relationship to mental illness and visa versa in a critical and unconventional way. But first and foremost, it is a book that understands depression, desperation, and destruction in a brutal, gritty, and absolute way.

"Sometimes, I get so consumed by depression that it is hard to believe that the whole world doesn't stop and suffer with me."