At the age of two, her parents divorced, and as her childhood went on, Wurtzel’s relationship with Donald slowly deteriorated. The long emergency that was my childhood was over”Įlizabeth Wurtzel was born in New York in 1967 to Lynne Winters and Donald Wurtzel – who she later discovered wasn’t her real father. “When I called my father and the phone was off, and the recording said there was no further information, I was relieved. To celebrate her life and supreme legacy, we explore and unpack her own fierce words. In a world gone wrong, a pure heart is dangerous.” She asserted: “I do not know any other way to be. Wurtzel tenaciously avoided convention at all costs, describing herself as a “free spirit”. Having lived a turbulent life that saw her battle life-long depression and a suffocating drug addiction, Wurtzel found fame with her bestselling debut memoir, Prozac Nation (1994) before going on to write four more books, including Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1998), and countless articles. The author and journalist – who passed away yesterday (January 7) after a five-year battle with breast cancer – turned this impossibility into fierce, vulnerable, and courageous writing that opened up the conversation about mental health, and reinvented the memoir genre for the better.

“If you should not say it, I can’t wait to scream it out the window,” she once wrote.

By her own declaration, Elizabeth Wurtzel spent her whole life driving people crazy.

Prozac nation book review