Elizabeth Wurtzel died on January 7, 2020, from complications due to cancer. Following her graduation, Wurtzel moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and found work as pop music critic for The New Yorker and New York Magazine. First serial to Vogue, Esquire and Mouth2Mouth. Wurtzel also received the 1986 Rolling Stone Magazine College Journalism Award. By turns emotionally powerful and tiresomely solipsistic, her book straddles the line between an absorbing self-portrait and a coy bid for public attention. Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of the memoir Prozac Nation, holds up a locket with the word Prozac and poses for a 1991 portrait in front of a window display of a hand holding pills. The title is misleading, for Wurtzel skimps on sociological analysis and remains too self-involved to justify her contention that depression is endemic to her generation. Here she unsparingly details her therapists, hospitalizations, binges of sex and drug use and the paralyzing spells of depression which afflicted her in high school and as a Harvard undergraduate and culminated in a suicide attempt and ultimate diagnosis of atypical depression, a severe, episodic psychological disorder. The onset of puberty, she recalls, also marked the onset of recurrent bouts of acute depression, sending her spiraling into episodes of catatonic despair, masochism and hysterical crying. After her parents' acrimonious divorce, Wurtzel was raised by her mother on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Twenty-six-year-old Wurtzel, a former critic of popular music for New York and the New Yorker, recounts in this luridly intimate memoir the 10 years of chronic, debilitating depression that preceded her treatment with Prozac in 1990.

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