Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Wurtzel
Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel is an American writer and journalist, known for publishing her best-selling memoir Prozac Nation, at the age of 26. She holds a BA in comparative literature from Harvard College and a JD from Yale Law School...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth31 July 1967
CountryUnited States of America
growing-up father real
Love is rather impotent and pitiful: My father must have told me a million times how much he loved me, but that emotion - assuming it was even real - hardly had the strength to counter the many other acts of wrong he committed against me. Contrary to romance novels and the love-conquers-all mentality that even those of us who grow up in an era of divorce are - in response to some atavistic instinct - still raised to believe, love is always a product and a victim of circumstances. It is fragile and small.
heart brain needs
It's nonverbal: I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on. And I know it's around me somewhere, but I just can't feel it.
passion approval-of-others insane
Embrace fanaticism. Harness joie de vivre by pursuing insane interests, consuming passions, and constant sources of gratification that do not depend on the approval of others
whole-life words-and-music slips
if only my whole life could be words and music, if only everything else could slip away.
mean simple dope
Getting help for substance abuse can be reduced to the deceptively simple focus of ‘keeping away from the dope.’ But what does getting help with depression mean? Learning to keep away from your own mind?
morning
Woke up this morning afraid I was gonna live.
sleep night feelings
I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.
love wish care
Sometimes I wish I could walk around with a HANDLE WITH CARE sign stuck to my forehead.
matter doe prozac-nation
Everything's plastic, we're all going to die sooner or later, so what does it matter.
fighting israel odds
Israel fights back, which is very much at odds with the Jewish instinct to discuss and deconstruct everything until action itself seems senseless.
country pride israel
Judaism will be enmeshed in pride and shame for as long as it endures. But to endure as a country, Israel must shun both these tendencies.
depression character offering
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 at all was my agony.
love depression knowing
Insanity is knowing that what you're doing is completely idiotic, but still, somehow, you just can't stop it.
book philosophical hair
The moment in The Bell Jar when Esther Greenwood realizes after thirty days in the same black turtleneck that she never wants to wash her hair again, that the repeated necessity of the act is too much trouble, that she wants to do it once and be done with it, seems like the book's true epiphany. You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended into philosophical heights.