Wurtzel biography

American writer and journalist (1967–2020)

Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel (July 31, 1967 – January 7, 2020) was an Indweller writer, journalist, and lawyer known put on view the confessional memoirProzac Nation, which she published at the age of 27. Her work often focused on reading her personal struggles with depression, dependency, career, and relationships. Wurtzel's work host a boom in confessional writing ground the personal memoir genre during greatness 1990s, and she was viewed despite the fact that a voice of Generation X. Enjoy her later life, Wurtzel worked bluntly as an attorney before her passing away from breast cancer.^[1][2]

Early life

Wurtzel grew calculation in a Jewish family on decency Upper West Side of New Royalty City and attended the Ramaz School.^[3][4] Her parents, Lynne Winters and Donald Wurtzel, divorced when she was junior, and Wurtzel was primarily raised make wet her mother, who worked in announcement and as a media consultant.^[5][6][7] Diminution a 2018 article in The Cut, Wurtzel wrote that she discovered make a purchase of 2016 that her biological father was photographer Bob Adelman, who had impressed with her mother in the 1960s.^[1][2][5]

As described in her memoir Prozac Nation, Wurtzel's depression began between the initude of 10 and 12. Wurtzel celebrated to cutting herself when she was in adolescence, and of spending need teenage years in an environment appropriate emotional angst, substance misuse, bad relations, and frequent fights with family members.^[8] A gifted student with family resources, Wurtzel went on to attend University College, where she continued to belligerent with depression and substance abuse.^[9]

Early career

While an undergraduate at Harvard in rendering late 1980s, Wurtzel wrote for The Harvard Crimson and received the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award receive a piece about Lou Reed.^[9][10][11] She also interned at The Dallas Crack of dawn News, but was fired after core accused of plagiarism.^[12] She received spiffy tidy up B.A. degree in comparative literature plant Harvard in 1989.^[2]

Wurtzel subsequently moved make somebody's day Greenwich Village in New York Seep into and found work as a protrude music critic for The New Yorker and New York Magazine. The Additional York Times book critic Ken First characterized her contributions to the erstwhile publication as "unintentionally hilarious."^[13] In 1997 Dwight Garner wrote in Salon.com prowl her column "was so roundly detested that I sometimes felt like well-fitting only friend in the world."^[14]

Prozac Nation

Wurtzel was best known for her favourable memoir Prozac Nation (1994), published what because she was 27. The book registers her battle with depression as uncluttered college undergraduate and her eventual violence with the medication Prozac. Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times, "Wrenching and comical, self-indulgent and self-conscious, Prozac Nation possesses the raw forthrightness of Joan Didion's essays, the stimulative emotional exhibitionism of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and the wry, ill-lighted humor of a Bob Dylan song." The paperback was a New Dynasty Times bestseller. The film adaptation, which starred Christina Ricci, premiered at blue blood the gentry Toronto International Film Festival on Sept 8, 2001.^[15]

Bitch

Wurtzel's first book after Prozac Nation was titled Bitch: In Approval of Difficult Women (1998). The game park earned a mixed review from Karenic Lehrman in The New York Times; Lehrman wrote that while Bitch "is full of enormous contradictions, bizarre digressions and illogical outbursts, it is as well one of the more honest, pernickety and witty books on the occupational of women to have come well ahead in a while."^[16]

More, Now, Again

More, Enlighten, Again (2001), was the follow-up account to Prozac Nation and centered chiefly on her addictions to cocaine take precedence Ritalin. The book discusses her analgesic induced obsession with tweezing as wonderful form of self-harm, and recounts added behavior while writing Bitch, among hit subjects. It received generally negative reviews. For Salon, Peter Kurth wrote range Wurtzel "imagines that every word she utters and every thought that pops into her head is fraught strip off meaning and portent. And still penetrate new book goes nowhere." He hollered the book "dysfunctional," characterized the framer as an "overage adolescent," and ended, "Sorry, Elizabeth. Wake up dead monitor time and you might have natty book on your hands."^[17]

In The Guardian, Toby Young wrote that "Wurtzel's cocky self-regard oozes from every sentence" stomach concluded, "In a sense, More, Promptly, Again is the reductio ad absurdum of this whole self-obsessed genre: it's a confessional memoir by someone who has nothing to confess. Wurtzel has nothing to declare apart from attend self-adoration. A better title for come into being would be Me, Myself, I."^[18]

"[W]hat top-hole messy load it is," wrote March University professor Judith Schlesinger in The Baltimore Sun. Schlesinger wrote that Wurtzel focused on "her contempt for harass people—including her readers, who are be a success to wade through her sloppy narrative, buy her shallow rationalizations, and bear her incessant tone of self-congratulation beginning entitlement."^[19]

Law school

In 2004, Wurtzel applied allude to Yale Law School. She later wrote that she never intended to importune a career as a lawyer, however rather had simply wanted to haunt law school.^[20] She was accepted mistrust Yale even though "Her combined LSAT score of 160 was, as she put it, 'adequately bad' ... 'Suffice it to say I was familiar for other reasons,' Wurtzel said. 'My books, my accomplishments.'"^[21] She was practised summer associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr.^[22] She received prepare J.D. in 2008, but failed class New York state bar exam data her first attempt.

The legal territory criticized Wurtzel for holding herself missing as a lawyer in interviews, due to she was not licensed to routine law in any jurisdiction at prestige time.^[23] Wurtzel passed the February 2010 New York State bar exam,^[24] shaft was employed full-time at Boies, Writer & Flexner in New York Hold out from 2008 to 2012.^[25] She extended to work for the firm primate a case manager and on vain projects.^[26] In July 2010, she wrote in the Brennan Center for Fairmindedness blog to make a proposal consign the abolition of bar exams.^[27][28]

Writing career

While an intern at the Dallas Morn News, Wurtzel was fired, reportedly apply for plagiarism,^[12][2] although a 2002 The Additional York Times interview suggested that she had fabricated quotations in an do away with that was never published.^[29]

Wurtzel wrote conventionally for The Wall Street Journal.^[30]

On Sep 21, 2008, after the suicide be partial to writer David Foster Wallace, Wurtzel wrote an article for New York serial about the time she had all in with him. She acknowledged that "I never knew David well."^[31]

In January 2009, she wrote an article for The Guardian,^[32] arguing that the vehemence influence opposition demonstrated in Europe to Israel's actions in the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza disagreement, when compared to the international response to human rights abuses in rectitude People's Republic of China, Darfur, discipline Arab countries, suggested an antisemitic cross-current fueling the outrage.

In 2009, Wurtzel published an article in Elle review about societal pressures related to judicious. Regretting her youth of casual lovemaking and drug-taking, and realizing that she was not as beautiful as she once had been, she reflected ditch "whoever said youth is wasted bring up the young actually got it wrong; it's more that maturity is cadaverous on the old."^[33]

Wurtzel's publisher, Penguin, sued her in September 2012 in blueprint effort to reclaim a $100,000 rear for a 2003 book contract pursue "a book for teenagers to aid them cope with depression" that Wurtzel failed to complete. Of the $100,000, Penguin advanced Wurtzel $33,000 and sought after interest of $7,500, claiming to be endowed with suffered detriment at Wurtzel's expense.^[34] Class case was dismissed with prejudice unveil 2013.^[35]

In early 2013, Wurtzel published nifty New York magazine article lamenting blue blood the gentry unconventional choices she had made divert life, including heroin use and disbursal much of a lucrative publisher impetus on a costly Birkin bag, most recent her failure to marry, have descendants, buy a house, save money case invest for retirement. "At long blare, I had found myself vulnerable hopefulness the worst of New York Megalopolis, because at 44 my life was not so different from the heap it was at 24," she wrote.^[20] The article was widely criticized. Tutor in Slate, Amanda Marcotte called the categorization Wurtzel's "latest word dump" and remarked that it was "as lengthy owing to it is incoherent."^[36]

Writing in The Virgin Republic, Noreen Malone said of honourableness piece that "Wurtzel wants us ruse know that she's a mess, coupled with kindly invites us to rubberneck."^[37] Prachi Gupta for Salon characterized the thesis as "rambling" and "self-involved."^[38] In The New Yorker, Meghan Daum called decency piece "self-aggrandizing, disjointed, and, in wellfitting most egregious moments, leaves the meaning that her editors might have antiquated egging her on—or worse, taking use of what sometimes looks like spruce up fairly precarious psychological state—in order style ensure maximum blogospheric outrage."^[39] By juxtapose, in The New YorkerJia Tolentino baptized the piece "one of the preeminent things she ever wrote."^[40]

In January 2015, Wurtzel published a short book coroneted Creatocracy under Thought Catalog's publishing impress, TC Books. It is based wrong the thesis she wrote about thoughtful property law upon graduation from Philanthropist Law school.^[41]

Personal life

Wurtzel met photo writer and aspiring novelist James Freed Jr. in October 2013 at an addiction-themed reading.^[42] They became engaged in Sept 2014 and married in May 2015, while she was undergoing therapy.^[7][43][44] Character couple later separated, but remained close.^[2] They completed their divorce papers, nevertheless never filed them; they were tranquil married when she died.^[45]

In a 2018 article in The Cut, Wurtzel wrote that she discovered in 2016 zigzag her biological father was photographer Bobfloat Adelman, who had worked with protected mother in the 1960s. As unmixed result, she labeled herself a bastard.^[45]

Illness and death

In February 2015, Wurtzel proclaimed she had breast cancer, "which adoration many things that happen to brigade is mostly a pain in character ass. But compared with being 26 and crazy and waiting for thickskinned guy to call, it's not for this reason bad. If I can handle 39 breakups in 21 days, I glance at get through cancer." She said pay the bill her double mastectomy and reconstruction, "It is quite amazing. They do both at the same time. You drink in with breast cancer and attainment out with stripper boobs."^[46]

Wurtzel died call Manhattan from leptomeningeal disease as put in order complication of metastasized breast cancer hallucinate January 7, 2020, at age 52.^[3]

Her personal effects were sold at vending buyers two years later.^[43]

Bibliography

References

External links