Bitchin Books

Lizzy, Lizzy, Lizzy!  Those of us who would classify ourselves as fans of the inimitable (would you imitate her?  Why?) Ms Wurtzel, may well approach a new release by her with some trepidation.  Oh, Lizzy – what are you up to now?  And yet, that’s where the fun of it is – like the schadenfreude of hearing all about a friend’s disastrous professional and amatory adventures, reading a wurtzel
memoir provides vicarious kicks aplenty, while causing us to bless ourselves and mutter, “There but for the grace of God …”.

For those who haven’t yet sampled it, this book moves on from the depression-and-how-I-survived-it saga of Prozac Nation, to detail Wurtzel’s subsequent professional success, alienation, drug addiction , disastrous romantic life and final clean-up via twelve-stepping and a serious therapy habit.

Irritation is  a reasonable reaction to many aspects of and incidents in, the book.  So you’re newly rich, famous and successful?  What do you do?  Simple, get drug-addicted!  You’re romantically involved with a  wonderful guy who’s cleaned up with you, adores you and drives you all the way home from your rehab and recovery centre?  Fantastic!  Now take drugs immediately and become so clingy, dependent and supinely submissive that he becomes bored and irritable enough to go right off you.  Smart moves!

But she does make a crazy, fun read out of her character flaws and bad decisions.  Perhaps her most annoying trait is portraying significant people in her life as more interesting, heroic and fascinating than they can actually be.  Every therapist, in particular, is wise, sophisticated, intuitive and brilliant.  That’s even when they’re clearly not, and probably just dying for the fifty minutes to be up so they can send in their bill and go home.  But she transforms, through her own interpretation, their gnomic (sometimes moronic) pronouncements into fascinating coherent narratives of her own neuroses.  Perhaps she should act as her own shrink and bill herself.  Whatever, her hero-making is probably part of her problem.

Anyhow,

Picture credit: Thoric/Wikimedia Commons under licence: see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

psychotherapist might be a better career choice for her than lawyer.  Her colourful neuroses could fit in better, less of a loss from the literary world than to the grey file-shuffling of the practice of law.

Still, Wurtzel has not finished with writing – her recent nutty political pronouncements are evidence of that.  Maybe the writing world will still get the benefit of all the nuttiness that has to be repressed out of the eight till eight lawyerly grind.  We can only hope – and fear.

Tags: addiction, drugs, Elizabeth Wurtzel, writer, writing

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 9:03 pm and is filed under creativity, reviews, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.