Elizabeth Wurtzel facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Elizabeth Wurtzel
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Elizabeth Wurtzel in 2010.
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| Born | Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel July 31, 1967 New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Died | January 7, 2020 (aged 52) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation |
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| Alma mater | Harvard College (BA) Yale Law School (JD) |
| Genre | Confessional memoir |
| Years active | 1976–2020 |
| Notable works | Prozac Nation |
| Spouse |
James Freed
(m. 2015) |
Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel (July 31, 1967 – January 7, 2020) was an American writer, journalist, and lawyer known for the confessional memoir Prozac Nation, which she published at the age of 27. Her work often focused on chronicling her personal struggles with depression, career, and relationships. Wurtzel's work drove a boom in confessional writing and the personal memoir genre during the 1990s, and she was viewed as a voice of Generation X. In later life, Wurtzel worked briefly as an attorney before her death from breast cancer.
Contents
Early life
Wurtzel grew up in a Jewish family on the Upper West Side of New York City and attended the Ramaz School. Her parents, Lynne Winters and Donald Wurtzel, divorced when she was young, and Wurtzel was primarily raised by her mother, who worked in publishing and as a media consultant. In a 2018 article in The Cut, Wurtzel wrote that she discovered in 2016 that her biological father was photographer Bob Adelman, who had worked with her mother in the 1960s.
As described in her memoir Prozac Nation, Wurtzel's depression began between the ages of 10 and 12. A gifted student with family wealth, Wurtzel went on to attend Harvard College, where she continued to struggle with depression.
Early career
While an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1980s, Wurtzel wrote for The Harvard Crimson and received the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award for a piece about Lou Reed. She also interned at The Dallas Morning News, but was fired after being accused of plagiarism. She received a B.A. degree in comparative literature from Harvard in 1989.
Wurtzel subsequently moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and found work as a pop music critic for The New Yorker and New York Magazine. The New York Times book critic Ken Tucker characterized her contributions to the former publication as "unintentionally hilarious." In 1997 Dwight Garner wrote in Salon.com that her column "was so roundly despised that I sometimes felt like its only friend in the world."
Prozac Nation
Wurtzel was best known for her best-selling memoir Prozac Nation (1994), published when she was 27. The book chronicles her battle with depression as a college undergraduate and her eventual treatment with the medication Prozac. The book was a New York Times bestseller. The film adaptation, which starred Christina Ricci, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2001.
More, Now, Again
More, Now, Again (2001), was the follow up memoir to Prozac Nation.
In The Guardian, Toby Young wrote that "Wurtzel's overweening self-regard oozes from every sentence" and concluded, "In a sense, More, Now, Again is the reductio ad absurdum of this whole self-obsessed genre: it's a confessional memoir by someone who has nothing to confess. Wurtzel has nothing to declare apart from her self-adoration. A better title for it would be Me, Myself, I."
"[W]hat a messy load it is," wrote Pace University professor Judith Schlesinger in The Baltimore Sun. Schlesinger wrote that Wurtzel focused on "her contempt for other people—including her readers, who are expected to wade through her sloppy story, buy her shallow rationalizations, and tolerate her incessant tone of self-congratulation and entitlement."
Law school
In 2004, Wurtzel applied to Yale Law School. She later wrote that she never intended to pursue a career as a lawyer, but rather had simply wanted to attend law school. She was accepted at Yale. She was a summer associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. She received her J.D. in 2008, but failed the New York state bar exam on her first attempt.
The legal community criticized Wurtzel for holding herself out as a lawyer in interviews, because she was not licensed to practice law in any jurisdiction at the time. Wurtzel passed the February 2010 New York State bar exam, and was employed full-time at Boies, Schiller & Flexner in New York City from 2008 to 2012. She continued to work for the firm as a case manager and on special projects. In July 2010, she wrote in the Brennan Center for Justice blog to make a proposal for the abolition of bar exams.
Writing career
While an intern at the Dallas Morning News, Wurtzel was fired, reportedly for plagiarism, although a 2002 The New York Times interview suggested that she had fabricated quotations in an article that was never published.
Wurtzel wrote regularly for The Wall Street Journal.
In January 2015, Wurtzel published a short book titled Creatocracy under Thought Catalog's publishing imprint, TC Books. It is based on the thesis she wrote about intellectual property law upon graduation from Yale Law school.
Personal life
Wurtzel met photo editor and aspiring novelist James Freed Jr. in October 2013. They became engaged in September 2014 and married in May 2015. The couple later separated, but remained close. They completed their divorce papers, but never filed them; they were still married when she died.
In a 2018 article in The Cut, Wurtzel wrote that she discovered in 2016 that her biological father was photographer Bob Adelman, who had worked with her mother in the 1960s.
Illness and death
In February 2015, Wurtzel announced she had breast cancer.
Wurtzel died in Manhattan from leptomeningeal disease as a complication of metastasized breast cancer on January 7, 2020, at age 52.
Her personal effects were sold at auction two years later.
See also
In Spanish: Elizabeth Wurtzel para niños
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