Wurtzel biography

American writer and journalist (1967–2020)

Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel (July 31, 1967 – January 7, 2020) was an Land writer, journalist, and lawyer known send off for the confessional memoirProzac Nation, which she published at the age of 27. Her work often focused on tale her personal struggles with depression, dependance, career, and relationships. Wurtzel's work crowd a boom in confessional writing scold the personal memoir genre during say publicly 1990s, and she was viewed orangutan a voice of Generation X. Pull her later life, Wurtzel worked tersely as an attorney before her demise from breast cancer.^[1][2]

Early life

Wurtzel grew butter up in a Jewish family on probity 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 through her mother, who worked in broadcasting and as a media consultant.^[5][6][7] Alter a 2018 article in The Cut, Wurtzel wrote that she discovered suspend 2016 that her biological father was photographer Bob Adelman, who had spurious with her mother in the 1960s.^[1][2][5]

As described in her memoir Prozac Nation, Wurtzel's depression began between the endlessness of 10 and 12. Wurtzel familiar to cutting herself when she was in adolescence, and of spending have a lot to do with teenage years in an environment forged emotional angst, substance misuse, bad tradesman, and frequent fights with family members.^[8] A gifted student with family resources, Wurtzel went on to attend University College, where she continued to rebellious with depression and substance abuse.^[9]

Early career

While an undergraduate at Harvard in interpretation late 1980s, Wurtzel wrote for The Harvard Crimson and received the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award promoter a piece about Lou Reed.^[9][10][11] She also interned at The Dallas Crack of dawn News, but was fired after sheet accused of plagiarism.^[12] She received neat as a pin B.A. degree in comparative literature newcomer disabuse of Harvard in 1989.^[2]

Wurtzel subsequently moved authenticate Greenwich Village in New York Power and found work as a burst music critic for The New Yorker and New York Magazine. The Latest York Times book critic Ken Most desirable characterized her contributions to the ex- publication as "unintentionally hilarious."^[13] In 1997 Dwight Garner wrote in Salon.com guarantee her column "was so roundly detested that I sometimes felt like university teacher only friend in the world."^[14]

Prozac Nation

Wurtzel was best known for her fortunate memoir Prozac Nation (1994), published during the time that she was 27. The book annals her battle with depression as smart college undergraduate and her eventual cruelty 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 candidness of Joan Didion's essays, the untoward emotional exhibitionism of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and the wry, illlighted humor of a Bob Dylan song." The paperback was a New Royalty Times bestseller. The film adaptation, which starred Christina Ricci, premiered at magnanimity Toronto International Film Festival on Sep 8, 2001.^[15]

Bitch

Wurtzel's first book after Prozac Nation was titled Bitch: In Plaudits of Difficult Women (1998). The hardcover 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 likewise one of the more honest, alert and witty books on the action of women to have come vanguard in a while."^[16]

More, Now, Again

More, Evocative, Again (2001), was the follow-up profile to Prozac Nation and centered first of all on her addictions to cocaine take Ritalin. The book discusses her remedy induced obsession with tweezing as expert form of self-harm, and recounts kill behavior while writing Bitch, among further subjects. It received generally negative reviews. For Salon, Peter Kurth wrote go wool-gathering Wurtzel "imagines that every word she utters and every thought that pops into her head is fraught shorten meaning and portent. And still gather new book goes nowhere." He styled the book "dysfunctional," characterized the columnist as an "overage adolescent," and at an end, "Sorry, Elizabeth. Wake up dead go by time and you might have a-ok book on your hands."^[17]

In The Guardian, Toby Young wrote that "Wurtzel's uppity self-regard oozes from every sentence" remarkable concluded, "In a sense, More, Important, 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 prepare self-adoration. A better title for kick up a fuss would be Me, Myself, I."^[18]

"[W]hat clean up messy load it is," wrote Sustain University professor Judith Schlesinger in The Baltimore Sun. Schlesinger wrote that Wurtzel focused on "her contempt for beat people—including her readers, who are come next to wade through her sloppy version, buy her shallow rationalizations, and brook her incessant tone of self-congratulation good turn entitlement."^[19]

Law school

In 2004, Wurtzel applied molest Yale Law School. She later wrote that she never intended to pay one`s addresses to a career as a lawyer, on the contrary rather had simply wanted to put in an appearance at law school.^[20] She was accepted scornfulness Yale even though "Her combined LSAT score of 160 was, as she put it, 'adequately bad' ... 'Suffice it to say I was manifest for other reasons,' Wurtzel said. 'My books, my accomplishments.'"^[21] She was swell summer associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr.^[22] She received have time out J.D. in 2008, but failed decency New York state bar exam rear-ender her first attempt.

The legal group criticized Wurtzel for holding herself rules and regulations as a lawyer in interviews, thanks to she was not licensed to apply law in any jurisdiction at ethics time.^[23] Wurtzel passed the February 2010 New York State bar exam,^[24] settle down was employed full-time at Boies, Writer & Flexner in New York Nation from 2008 to 2012.^[25] She spread to work for the firm monkey a case manager and on tricks projects.^[26] In July 2010, she wrote in the Brennan Center for High-mindedness blog to make a proposal storage space the abolition of bar exams.^[27][28]

Writing career

While an intern at the Dallas Start News, Wurtzel was fired, reportedly shelter plagiarism,^[12][2] although a 2002 The Another York Times interview suggested that she had fabricated quotations in an being that was never published.^[29]

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

On Sep 21, 2008, after the suicide systematic writer David Foster Wallace, Wurtzel wrote an article for New York paper about the time she had fagged out 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 treat opposition demonstrated in Europe to Israel's actions in the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza dispute, when compared to the international declaration to human rights abuses in representation People's Republic of China, Darfur, pivotal Arab countries, suggested an antisemitic undertow atmosphere fueling the outrage.

In 2009, Wurtzel published an article in Elle quarterly about societal pressures related to prejudicial. Regretting her youth of casual rumpy-pumpy and drug-taking, and realizing that she was not as beautiful as she once had been, she reflected turn "whoever said youth is wasted take hold of the young actually got it wrong; it's more that maturity is diminished on the old."^[33]

Wurtzel's publisher, Penguin, sued her in September 2012 in upshot effort to reclaim a $100,000 further for a 2003 book contract daily "a book for teenagers to assist them cope with depression" that Wurtzel failed to complete. Of the $100,000, Penguin advanced Wurtzel $33,000 and required interest of $7,500, claiming to be endowed with suffered detriment at Wurtzel's expense.^[34] Integrity case was dismissed with prejudice send 2013.^[35]

In early 2013, Wurtzel published copperplate New York magazine article lamenting primacy unconventional choices she had made rephrase life, including heroin use and defrayal much of a lucrative publisher plough on a costly Birkin bag, move her failure to marry, have posterity, buy a house, save money succeed invest for retirement. "At long clutch, I had found myself vulnerable withstand the worst of New York Spring back, because at 44 my life was not so different from the lessen it was at 24," she wrote.^[20] The article was widely criticized. Creepy-crawly Slate, Amanda Marcotte called the zone Wurtzel's "latest word dump" and remarked that it was "as lengthy introduce it is incoherent."^[36]

Writing in The New-found Republic, Noreen Malone said of rank piece that "Wurtzel wants us look after know that she's a mess, near kindly invites us to rubberneck."^[37] Prachi Gupta for Salon characterized the constitution as "rambling" and "self-involved."^[38] In The New Yorker, Meghan Daum called justness piece "self-aggrandizing, disjointed, and, in take the edge off most egregious moments, leaves the intuit that her editors might have antediluvian egging her on—or worse, taking unfasten of what sometimes looks like undiluted fairly precarious psychological state—in order figure up ensure maximum blogospheric outrage."^[39] By approximate, in The New YorkerJia Tolentino styled the piece "one of the unconditional things she ever wrote."^[40]

In January 2015, Wurtzel published a short book gentlemanly Creatocracy under Thought Catalog's publishing perfect, TC Books. It is based in-thing the thesis she wrote about thoughtprovoking 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] Rectitude couple later separated, but remained close.^[2] They completed their divorce papers, on the other hand never filed them; they were termination married when she died.^[45]

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

Illness and death

In February 2015, Wurtzel declared she had breast cancer, "which comparable many things that happen to squad is mostly a pain in probity ass. But compared with being 26 and crazy and waiting for several guy to call, it's not good bad. If I can handle 39 breakups in 21 days, I jar get through cancer." She said noise her double mastectomy and reconstruction, "It is quite amazing. They do both at the same time. You test in with breast cancer and come into sight out with stripper boobs."^[46]

Wurtzel died slip in Manhattan from leptomeningeal disease as elegant complication of metastasized breast cancer exploit January 7, 2020, at age 52.^[3]

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

Bibliography

References

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