There are many reasons to hate this book, and there are many reasons to be in awe of its vulnerability (and incredible, INCREDIBLE angst). If you're wanting a view into Prozac and its impact on the 90s - this isn't it! If you're wanting an honest depiction of what depression feels like from a teenage girl, maaaaybe read it and all of its self aggrandizing glory. Just don't say I didn't warn you!

oh HECK YEAH, another one for us BPD girlies!!!

while this is an extremely painful and depressive read (as it details very thoroughly all the symptoms, the ups and downs, and the thought processes behind a very mentally ill teenager and young adult), it is absolutely brilliant exactly in its honesty and skill. highly recommended for everyone interested in mental health non-fiction or memoirs; this has so easily become such a favourite and I think i highlighted half the book at this point.

There are many schools of thought about manic-depression: chemical imbalance in the brain, evolutionary response to ruptured social circumstance, mature confrontation of existential angst… and then there is the point of view that there are some people who just can’t get their heads out of their own a**. Sadly, this book frequently gives ammunition to that final, least-charitable, theory.

An interesting read, by a talented young woman that you alternately pity and want to smack upside the head. It is hard to say how much Ms. Wurtzel wrote this book, and how much was written by the disease. On the plus side: the experience of reading gave me an idea of how alternately frustrating and rewarding it must be to care about someone in the grips of this illness. And the author was a brave voice for her generation in sharing the unappealing realties of depression -- which does frequently (inevitably?) include a certain amount of self-absorption. On the minus side: sometime the reader feels that he/she is just another pawn in the cycle of the author’s elaborate charade. (I shelled out twenty bucks for this book in that 90’s – does that make me an enabler?) Ms. Wurtzel seems stuck in the stage of recovery that is self-promoting without being self-aware, which is no doubt part of the illness but makes for a much less worthwhile read than "Darkness Visible" (okay - perhaps tat is an unfair comparison!), "Girl Interrupted" or "Welcome to My Country".

I just completed reading ‘Prozac Nation’ by Elizabeth Wurtzel and I understand that a lot of people don’t like this book. Labeling her as whiny and selfish. Or saying she doesn’t describe depression right. First people suffering from depression don’t all experience it the same way. So one person who doesn’t relate to her experience doesn’t discredit her experience with it. For example majority of this book was scarily relatable with me, and there was like 20% that I didn’t relate to but I think she did an excellent job describing HER experience with depression and the toll it took on her life, along with the people around her. It did take me longer than normal to read because I had to stop because I was very triggered. That being said I liked it, won’t be reading again anytime soon because of triggers but this was a raw, unfiltered and true telling of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s experience with depression and I think that’s what I liked the most. She didn’t hide anything even the parts that made her seem whatever negative way to people. I appreciate honesty and rawness in discussions with mental health.

it took me a while to get through this book but i’m glad i stayed with it, it’s definitely worth reading and although elizabeth is rather self centred she is also very funny, brave and smart

There was so much to think about and be sad about while reading this exceptional book. What a lovely child-woman she was, but in certain respects she did not stand a chance in this world and if you read this book with sharp eyes, you can really see that.

I can’t think of a case where a mother behaved more negligently, as a care giver to her only child than in the case of Elizabeth Wurtzel. Lynn Winters, Elizabeth Wurzel's mother, in a very concrete way destroyed her daughters life. She perverted a once sparkling life and her diabolical secrecy, deformity of character and incredible selfishness ultimately destroyed Elizabeth Wurtzel. I firmly believe this.

Elizabeth's mother kept the identity of her real father from Wurtzel for the first fifty years of her life, only revealing the truth after the biological and presumed father had both died. Her biological father was known to Elizabeth as merely a family friend, and at one time he gave her a gift of $5,000, which puzzled her. The deadbeat, biological father ended up being the well known photographer, Bob Adelman, who was made famous for his photos of the civil rights movement of the sixties.

The presumed father, the man who thought he was the father to Elizabeth Wurtzel, and who was hounded by Wurtzel's mentally disturbed and morally bankrupt mother, Lynn Winters, (for decades for having not done enough for Elizabeth) was the unfortunate Donald Wurtzel, who died thinking he was Elizabeth Wurtzel's father. WOW. I'm sorry but that is SOOOOOOOO reprehensible.

What is the most sad to me is reading this book from the eyes of a mother of almost 55. I see so many things younger readers may well not see. Experience as a daughter, a sister and a mother gives me that ability.

Elizabeth Wurtzel was 26 when the book was first published in 1994, still just a kid, so there is a definite naivety to much of her tone in the writing. She reveals a great deal about the dynamic between her mother and herself, without even meaning to, such as the fact that she addresses her as "Mommy" for most of her adult life. The perverse relationship is there for all to see. The ways in which the mother rewards her daughter and then punishes her with banishment when she does not perform. Yes, the book is well written, with her sparkling wit, humor and incredible vocabulary. It is a pleasure to read but on another level it is also such a melancholy experience at the same time.

The ways in which Elizabeth Wurtzel did not understand why she became depressed at the age of 11, when again her mother tossed her away to summer camp, seem very clear to me. To go to summer camp for two weeks, that is something most people can relate to. I remember Outdoor School quite well. But for five years to abandon your child for TWO MONTHS at a stretch, and absolutely refuse to give in when the child wants to come back home requires a level of emotional distance, selfishness, an inability to understand genuine pain that is frankly, extremely disturbing.

What this dynamic of not "listening" to your child does, is that it tells the child in a very concrete way that no, they do NOT matter. It tells them that their needs are NOT important. The parent who chooses NOT to listen to, or accept that perhaps their child knows something important that the parent should listen to and they still choose to ignore it, is guilty of a form of parental negligence that is tragic. It is tragic because it can express itself in many forms of unconscious emotional and spiritual abuse. This is what mother's do who know their daughters are being sexually abused. This is what mother's do who know their sons are being physically abused. They choose NOT to listen. They choose to turn away.

This form of abandonment is a form of serious rejection. Elizabeth Wurtzel had to intuit that on an intellectual and emotional level her mother really, honestly did not want her around. And the anxiety that it produced burned itself on her brain. Her brain, while still developing was reconfigured in an abnormal way by the external forces she could not control. Two months every summer of abandonment by her primary care giver produced such anxiety in her that her brain would never be normal again and that anxiety would replay over and over for the rest of her life. You might think summer camp is no big deal but to a child like Wurtzel, it was a big deal. She needed to feel the safety of being at home, as many kids do. But her mother chose to ignore her needs to feel safe and abandoned her.

What does Wurtzel say again and again to any boyfriend she has? "You're going to leave me, aren't you?!" She asks this desperately, angrily, again and again, for years. Who she is really asking this question to of course, is her mother! THIS is unconscious motivation. And the young Wurtzel doesn't even see it, at any time in the writing of this book, or apparently even after it was written.

While reading the book, I felt I was on a quest. To do a "close reading" of course, which is what I was taught in college. Do a "close reading" my writing, poetry and English professors all told me. In the book, Elizabeth does a great job of making excuses for her mother, repeatedly, like a battered child does. In exactly the same way that a battered child runs back to its abuser, hoping that maybe finally, the relationship will be mended, she continues to accept that her mothers "issues" and problems, and/or needs are more important than her own.

But in this text, the truth is revealed in key words. It tiny snippets, littered here and there.

I don't need to know about "The Accidental Blowjob," or who she cheats with, betraying yet another girlfriend, because I understand that betrayal is something Elizabeth Wurtzel learned since the day she was born. And particularly for the five years she was dumped off at summer camp for an astounding two months per summer. WOW. When I was a kid, I heard of kids going for two to three weeks but two MONTHS? That's what preoccupied selfish mothers' did. Not loving mother's who wanted to make sure their kids were safe and happy.

The truth of Wurtzel's life comes out in snippets. In the small sentences that stay with me, her history is revealed. She talks about being left to cry "alone in my crib." She talks about the five years her mother carts her off to summer camp. She talks about her mother's vindictive obsession with making her "father" miserable by attacking him for all that he does not do. But Donald Wurtzel was not Elizabeth's father? So, to read Prozac Nation is to go back in time, knowing something that the voice of the author does not know and it is a strange experience, stranger still knowing that the poor girl is now dead.

And yet, those little snippets reveal themselves again and again.

She writes about how her mother has "boyfriends" but does not elaborate much on that. Did Lynn Winters want free time to spend with these men when Wurtzel was at summer camp, so she could live with them, spend unencumbered time with them? Then, shockingly in the middle of the book, Wurtzel reveals a bombshell that one of her mother's boyfriends rapes her when she is 12. But it is simply revealed in one single sentence. Where a whole book could be written on that alone, she says nothing more about it. You are left astounded, wondering why she did not focus on that traumatic experience more. Another time she lets her selfish mother off the hook? Probably. But one has to wonder, how does a woman NOT know she is with a man who will rape a small child? Who was this man? Is he still alive? How could Elizabeth Wurtzel's mother NOT know that a man she was intimate with was also a child sex predator? And what happened after? Was the man every charged? Was this another secret Lynn Winters insisted on keeping, as status obsessed as she was with what other people might think of her?

After reading Prozac Nation, for the first time this year, I did some research on Elizabeth Wurtzel and found out about her real father and her presumed father, both dead and both not able to discuss with her this most profound betrayal at the hands of her mother. That the presumed father had no idea of the reality of his ex-wife's lie, but also about a lie the biological father had willingly participated in too, at the behest of the mother, Lynn Winters.

To learn these things, and to think back to the book Prozac Nation and all that it reveals is to see a most malignant woman, Lynn Winters. I am astounded that this woman could betray so many people and hurt her only child so profoundly in the process by doing all the despicable things she did. She is described by Wurtzel as "a very private person" and someone who's love is not unconditional but bound with endless conditions.

When Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote about being told of this horrible betrayal later, after she found out the truth, she quoted her mother as saying, during an argument, "Oh, get over it!" I was astounded when I read those words. "OH, GET OVER IT." That is what someone says when they are discussing something that is irrelevant or unimportant. Not a betrayal of this magnitude.

That is what a malignant narcissistic says. So, I'm left feeling extremely sad for the little girl Elizabeth Wurtzel used to be. She is continually rejected by her mother. In one form or another. If she changes her appearance, she is carted off to her aunts house "for a few days" as punishment for piercing her ears or coloring her hair. She learns to worry, to fear, to obsess about eventual abandonment because abandonment is something her mother has taught her to expect.

This is a long review and I will probably come back and add to it over the next few weeks but just be sure that this is a most excellent book but for me, it was heart wrenching to read. Through the humor, the jaded self deprecating humor, I saw a brilliant girl who was "trying so hard" to please her neurotic mother, who was suffering so much because of things her mother had done to her. What life taught Elizabeth Wurtzel, what her mother taught her was that she could trust no one.

Not even herself.

‘Depression was the loneliness fucking thing on earth.‘

Having battled with depression since I was 14 (10 years now), I’ve found it very difficult to put into words my thought patterns and behaviours and almost impossible to find accurate representations. Wurtzel manages to put into words much of what I’ve struggled with.

‘A human can survive almost anything, as long as she sees an end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end.’

My copy of this book is battered, bent and covered in scribbles and highlighted passages from rereads. I’ve used it to explain to my family things I haven’t been able to previously. I’ve been on medications for several years now and I appreciated her honest comments about them and the psychiatric process.

‘Was there a disease that involved an intense desire to die, but no will to go through with it?’

This is a book I’d encourage anyone whose dealt with mental illness or knows someone who has to read.

2022: about to start a reread 4 years later.

OH MY GOD FINALLY IT IS OVER.

I really think I should’ve loved this book - I love memoirs, messy women, sadness, drugs, alcohol, etc. BUT OH MY GOD. I actually was physically angry reading this. And I rolled my eyes SEVERAL times inadvertently. There are moments when the author can tell she’s being ridiculous, yet she persists. I just can’t. Imagine your mom gets mugged and you’re mad because now you can’t lay in bed and rot. And then WRITING THAT IN A BOOK AND PUBLISHING IT. God. RUE THIS BOOK - this was the closest I’ve ever been to a DNF. Even it ends with us AT LEAST had some plot to keep me going. This was just painful.

Books you should read instead:
How to murder your life
Girl interrupted
Tweak
Basketball diaries

if you suffer from depression or any other mental illness, this memoir will remind you that you are not alone in this. thank you so much Elizabeth

You skip school for a week and it took your so called friends four whole days to notice, and when they ask what is it you've been up to and you answer 'I am afraid to live and depression has landed its final hit. Somehow I can't get out of bed' there is a slight shrugh that reads: Oh, it's only depression. I thought it was somehow much serious.
To understand that depression is not just a moment is the most crucial step to anyone who has never been through an illness as hideous as this one. If you and your loved ones have been spared, thank your little stars, because there's no escape from this downright spiral. Depression is not ''feeling sad'' or ''crying too much'', although that might also happen - but to be at war with yourself.
It is humiliation and not being able to keep your eyes open, to arrive home late and lay in bed in your own dirty clothing because switching to pijamas would take too much of your time. It is only taking a shower once a month or spending the enterity of your life stuck in a bathtub, soaking your demons in water. Hoping you'll have the strenght, someday perhaps, to get up. Avoiding life is never the answer for peace, that is clear, but depression is so absolutely dreadful that life is not even a word anymore. There's no life besides laying in bed. Who cares about cleaning up your apartment if your insides are broken and who cares about putting on lipstick if there's nothing in the whole god damn world who'd make you feel like a person by looking at the mirror... To be stripped of one's identity describes the depressive because Who is this person looking back? Why am I inside this body? Please Please Please (Let me get what I want) Let me get out of this body... I don't want to exist anymore.
It is an ongoing battle within your own head and no pill will make you get out of this state. Still its not a good enough ''reason'' and you have a job to attend and perhaps a family to take care of, and besides all love in your heart, you can't seem to let it show through. To lose everything precious you have is the beggining of depression because you seem to have lost the most valuable thing of them all and that is yourself... And anger very rarely seems to show through but when it does it is never beautiful, like a cinema frame where tears don't smudge eyeshadow and your hair falls into place. It is hair falling, not brushing your hair - it is screaming your heart out and wanting the pillow you're screaming to to swallow you whole. And smashing plates. And ripping pages off your favourite books. And smoking a hundred ciggarettes a day and not bothering to get burned
Depression is most definitely a house on fire
I am that house on fire but no one has noticed it yet....
Still waiting for the day I start smelling like a house on fire but back then it will be too late. Perhaps



I deeply praise Wurtzel for her courage to bring this to the world. It doesn't matter if you found it whiny or ridiculous, because depression is ridiculous for gods sake, it turns people into robots, it deprives them from living. It is clearly an obnoxious illness to people who've never been there. I am not saying I have, but I'm saying I understood and I felt for this memoir on one of the deepest ways possible. I have a lot of respect for Wurtzel.
Depressives also do not care much about praise, even though of course it is always nice to get compliments but who the hell cares about them if they come with second intentions? We're told they're strong but we don't feel strong. We feel like the weakest.

Maybe we're the weakest out of the stronger ones and the strongest out of the weak.
This is no longer making sense.
I recommend the memoir to people with depression AND people next to people who suffer from depression. It is a nice, complex description of what it feels like living with this illness.

Thank you for surviving. You deserve it.

I have written most of what I want to say about this book already. Briefly: yes, this book is a work of titanic self-absorption, a huge monument to the author's solipsism. And to enjoy it, it is necessary to get past that. But you should get past it. Part of Wurtzel's plan here is to give in entirely to the dictates of depression, and serious depression is so punishing and so inherently inward-looking that it's necessary to retreat into self-absorption to truly chronicle it. So she pushes on, indifferent to the fact that she would certainly be accused of pretension and narcissism. She took a gamble, and by my lights, she won.

I loved this because I too am a pretentious and unstable young woman.