‘I Hate Myself and I Want to Die.” With the title of her prologue Elizabeth Wurtzel starts as she means to go on. Prozac Nation, published just over 25 years ago, was raw and in-your-face, a bald, bold bid for our attention. She was 27 when she threw open this unvarnished account of her dive into the black of depression, into a regime of pills – Prozac was only one of the many medications she was treated with – and darkness. In the book’s early pages she set out her stall, describing the creep of her illness, its deadly pull. “You won’t even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning 12 or turning 15, and then one day you realise that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.”
Not everyone was convinced that Wurtzel’s introspection had much value to anyone beyond herself. “Prozac Nation is being hyped as a tract on youthful angst in the 90s, but it reads more like the self-absorbed rantings of an adolescent,” ran a review in Newsweek. Michiko Kakutani, writing in the New York Times, admitted to wanting to shake the author: “There are far worse fates than growing up during the 70s in New York and going to Harvard.” Yet Kakutani also praised “her forthrightness, her humour and her ability to write sparkling, luminescent prose”.
And it was those qualities that struck me when I read the book – at 27, as it happens, for Wurtzel was just a few months older than I am. I, too, had lived with depression, with the mysterious shadow that was either a part of myself or beyond myself, I could never quite tell. Was this me, all the time, or could this be fixed? What was it, anyhow, that needed fixing? I had read William Styron’s memoir of his depression, Darkness Visible, when it came out in 1989, my final year in college; it’s a book I still admire, yet Styron’s life was so far removed from mine that it was hard to find a real echo of my suffering in its pages. Suffering: it’s hard to type, even now. Who was I to suffer when there was, and is, so much real suffering in the world? But that’s not how depression works.
Prozac Nation is a portrait of depression’s narcissism, the desperate focus on the self that blots out the rest of the world. But, if there here was no denying Wurtzel’s privilege, there was also no denying her pain: she gave it all to us, every last drop. When I found her book – thanks to all the hype that surrounded it – well, it was a godsend. It allowed me to begin to think about whatever it was I was going through. It also allowed me to consider the possibility of taking medication for an illness, as I took medication for other illnesses; that, too, was an extraordinary personal liberation.
If Prozac Nation now seems less remarkable than it did in 1994, that’s because it did mark a shift in the conversation. You could argue that it was one of the most characteristic literary products of the early 90s: the end of history, remember? The Berlin Wall had fallen, Clinton had yet to be impeached, Britain was now seamlessly connected to Europe thanks to the opening of the Channel tunnel: no need to look outward any more, so why not gaze right in? Not that the confessional memoir was really anything new: St Augustine had opened up the subject centuries before, and certainly it’s fair to say that Wurtzel’s memoir rhymes with books such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
But those books are, of course, novels. The way in which we now take the most coruscating personal memoir for granted owes something to Wurtzel. Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, about incest, appeared a few years later; into the new millennium came books such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, about his drug addiction and recovery, and Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath, a powerful portrait of divorce. Is there an echo of Wurtzel in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s obsessive detailing of his and his family’s lives over the six volumes of My Struggle? Perhaps.
All these books, in their different ways, worked to begin difficult conversations and that is no bad thing. Wurtzel continued along the path of brutal self-revelation, and it didn’t always win her friends. But the way in which she revealed herself blew open a door. I would think of her work, too, when I read Andrew Solomon’s extraordinary book, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, published in 2001. It is a memoir of his own bitter suffering, but also a complete engagement with how depression is viewed and treated across the world; it looks both inward and outward, with both thoroughness and compassion.
Sometimes, I admit, I’m forced to wonder if there is a downside to all this openness. Part of the pleasure – let’s call it that – of reading a book like Prozac Nation is the shocking sense that you, the reader, are privy to information to which you are not at all entitled. In our daily lives the sharing of this sort of information is a true intimacy, a marker that a friendship or relationship has crossed a very particular boundary. Confessional memoir leaps across that boundary with abandon. I wonder, now, if there is an unspoken or even an unconscious pressure on those who embark on memoir to give themselves away wholly, to hold nothing back, no matter what it might cost them – or those close to them.
Yet the pull towards revelation, and the push back against it, has always been the compelling tension in the memoir form. How much is enough? How much is too much. Elizabeth Wurtzel was, in all her writing, thrillingly too much – and the world is a poorer place without her.