The place — a hot, sweaty, cramped reading room on the fifth floor of Barnes ‘ Noble, filled with pierced faces and blue hair and angry, angry women. The time — well, she’s already running late. A little late. Fine, Elizabeth Wurtzel is pretty damn late to her own book reading, but there must be a good reason. A full half hour has gone by and not many are at all surprised. After experiencing any of her fever-paced, love-’em-or-hate-’em, mortifyingly confessional books, it is no wonder that this precocious literary light, this critics’ whipping post, is on time for anything.
When she finally does arrive, she blows through the parted crowd, slouched over with giant, Bambi-like “forgive me” eyes, clutching the chunky black sweater coat that hangs from her ballerina’s frame. She stammers through a wholly Wurtzel-ian excuse regarding her tardiness: a mishap of epic proportions involving a struggle with her wild blond hair and a necklace. Go figure!
Wurtzel proceeds with a rushed reading from her latest book, “More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction,” in a painfully nasal New York accent that echoes the infamous, blood-curdling drawl of the late Truman Capote. Constantly interrupting herself to share mouth-watering tidbits of gossip — Oksana Biaul checked into the same rehab facility after Wurtzel left — she runs through two chapters in a manner reminiscent of a reluctant fourth grader forced to read her paper in front of the entire class.
And indeed, this neurotic, flighty authoress has much to prove to the literary community and to a slew of angsty Gen-Xers — the sort of die-hard Prozac Nation fans who are slumping hesitantly into adulthood and searching for some sort of guidance. Wurtzel surely hopes to be this “lost” generation’s literary messiah. Her edgy books are marketed toward a younger audience and are widely appreciated for their shocking honesty, their willingness to open cultural dialogue between estranged child and parent and between the depressed and the even more depressed. This eagerness to connect with an audience is what has made Wurtzel into such a popular, high-profile writer at the relatively young age of 34.
“I resent that people assume I write out of this total self-absorption. I just really think that it makes people feel better to read something that relates to their own experience,” Wurtzel said of her relationships with both her toughest critics and her truest fans.
And boy, are the critics tough. She deals with an endless barrage of harsh opinions, much of them warranted. Many people, critics and readers alike, are reluctant to listen to this woman, who has been called “the self-made Suzanne Somers of literary letters” by Salon.com, and “the closest thing to Britney Spears that Harvard College has ever produced” by USAToday, and has been compared to Courtney Love and Howard Stern (by her publishers!). They are reluctant to listen to this rich, young, sexy writer who shops religiously at Barney’s and turns her own personal trauma into art a la the Confessional poets. Wurtzel, who undoubtedly wishes with each extinguished batch of birthday candles for a DNA test to surface, revealing her identity as the misunderstood lovechild of Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, has indeed admitted her affinity for confessional poetry and denounced the lack of personal experience in much of the literature being written today.
“When you’re writing from your own experience, part of you lives in the story. There’s just more value to writing about nightmarish experience. People aren’t used to my style of writing because this value has disappeared from literature. It’s just jarring and stirring in a different sort of way,” she said.
Wurtzel certainly delves into the darkest and skankiest details of her own nightmarish experience in her latest book. Described in the book jacket in a manner so saccharine, so syrupy sweet that it would kill a hypoglycemic a thousand times over — “this book is as honest as a confession and as heartfelt as a prayer” — “More, Now, Again,” will be her last book for a long time. Wurtzel simply declared, “There are no more bad experiences in me. I’ll just be dead after any more.”
Don’t lose hope yet, Elizabeth. I believe one of your idols, Sylvia Plath, said it best in her poem “Lady Lazarus,” a meditation on her own depression and multiple suicide attempts: “Dying / is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” You alone, amongst a slew of faux-pessimistic authors, a bunch of sad sack writers who mope through life, keep this intense, burning and ultimately embarrassing Confessional poet “life-as-art, depression-as-career” manifesto alive. Stay strong. Stay proud. And for God’s sake, stay clean.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
