Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of the 1994 memoir, “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America,” passed away after battling breast cancer on Tuesday in Manhattan at the age of 52.
For Prozac Nation, she won praise for opening a dialogue about clinical depression. She also introduced an unsparing style of confessional writing, which remains influential.
Her childhood friend and writer David Samuels said the cause of her death was metastatic breast cancer that resulted from the BRCA gene mutation, for which she had to undergo a double mastectomy in 2015.
After receiving the diagnosis, she wrote about her experience in The New York Times. She wrote, “I could have had a mastectomy with reconstruction and skipped the part where I got cancer. I feel like the biggest idiot for not doing so.” She also became an advocate for BRCA testing.
Wurtzel published her first book “Prozac Nation” when she was 27, in which she shared her days as a student at Harvard, drug use, extensive sex life and much more. Her book became a cultural reference point.
Samuels said, “Lizzie’s literary genius rests not just in her acres of quotable one-liners but in her invention of what was really a new form, which has more or less replaced literary fiction — the memoir by a young person no one has ever heard of before.”
“It was a form that Lizzie fashioned in her own image because she always needed to be both the character and the author,” he added.
Writer Meghan Daum wrote, “We resented her [Wurtzel] for being such a famous and hot little mess yet we couldn’t help but begrudgingly admire her ability to parlay her neuroses into financial rewards and a place in the literary scene.”
Elizabeth Wurtzel was born on July 31, 1967, in Manhattan. She grew up on the Upper East Side. She started writing “Prozac Nation” in 1986, while she was studying at Harvard. In 1994, she told Vice, “It [Prozac Nation] was originally a book about Harvard; it wasn’t even about depression but everything in it was about being depressed, so that changed it.”
