Writers and readers are remembering Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of the 1994 hit memoir Prozac Nation, who died of breast cancer on Tuesday at 52.
At The Daily Beast, author Molly Jong-Fast says that Wurtzel was “a weird poet-angel of the mid-1990s pre-apocalypse.”
“I read her book, pored over its pages, said things to myself like ‘I could write that,’ but I knew I actually couldn’t,” Jong-Fast writes. “She made it look easy in a way that memoir writing actually isn’t.”
Deborah Copaken, writing for the Atlantic, says that Prozac Nation “forever changed the literary landscape.”
“It redefined not only what women were allowed to write about, but when they were allowed to write about it: their messy, early decades in medias res,” she writes. “Mental illness was no longer something to be hidden or shameful.”
Admirers of Wurtzel are posting tributes to the author on Twitter:
no tribute or obituary can do justice to the incredible elizabeth wurtzel the way her own writing did. this is such a loss. https://t.co/z7flNfH4S7 pic.twitter.com/gLBFRlx1uo
— Jennifer Schaffer (@jmschaff) January 7, 2020
People spent so many years writing about Elizabeth Wurtzel as a Sad Example Of Something -- female memoir-writers, women who got famous for being themselves, young women generally -- and to see her gone so young is a harsh reminder of how cruel that was. https://t.co/ADyZFpTdAX
— Sady Doyle (@sadydoyle) January 7, 2020
Elizabeth Wurtzel got a lot of shit because she was beautiful, and she cared about being beautiful, and she had fun because she was beautiful, and patriarchy won't let those women be taken seriously: it wants them to suffer. I love this piece of hers: https://t.co/Nx9chRLMAB
— Dr Charlotte Lydia Riley (@lottelydia) January 7, 2020
Elizabeth Wurtzel was a major factor in making personal essay the currency of women writers in the 90s. This was a blessing and a curse, both for her and for the rest of us. We all deserved better and to be better, and I'm sad she's gone.
— Racheline Maltese (@racheline_m) January 7, 2020
It's impossible to convey the impact Elizabeth Wurtzel had in the '90s. She was unapologetic, raw, honest. She stood for a very specific form of GenX femininity, confession, rage.
— Erin Blakemore (@heroinebook) January 7, 2020
We learned from her—and from how intensely she was mocked for writing about her own life. pic.twitter.com/1KAViZL503
Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas–based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
