Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose candid 1994 novel Prozac Nation helped start a national conversation about depression and mental health, has died at the age of 52, NBC News reports. Her husband confirms that she died of breast cancer.
Prior to the publication of her groundbreaking novel, Wurtzel had built up a rather checkered career in journalism, on the one hand winning college journalism awards while on the other hand being accused of plagiarism and of turning in content that was so bad it was “unintentionally hilarious.”
However, in 1994, at the age of 27, Wurtzel published her seminal work, a memoir about her lifetime of struggles with depression and being treated with Prozac , or fluoxetine. The medication was a relatively new treatment for clinical depression.
In Prozac Nation , Wurtzel describes her experience with atypical depression beginning when she was a pre-adolescent and continuing through her college years and her early working career.
Like her career as a whole, Prozac Nation received mixed reaction from reviewers. Writing in The New York Times , book reviewer Michiko Katukani described the book as “by turns wrenching and comical, self-indulgent and self-aware” and noted that Wurtzel seemed to relish in self-pity.
“There are far worse fates than growing up during the ’70s in New York and going to Harvard,” Katukani wrote.
It’s impossible to convey the impact Elizabeth Wurtzel had in the ’90s. She was unapologetic, raw, honest. She stood for a very specific form of GenX femininity, confession, rage.
We learned from her—and from how intensely she was mocked for writing about her own life. pic.twitter.com/1KAViZL503
— Erin Blakemore (@heroinebook) January 7, 2020
Despite its sharp criticism, Prozac Nation was a bestseller as well as the catalyst for a frank and open discussion about mental health, something that, prior to that time, was not as openly discussed. It also inspired a feature film of the same name starring Christina Ricci.
Wurtzel, for her part, failed to see lightning strike twice. Her two follow-up books, a collection of essays titled B*tch: In Praise of Difficult Women and the memoir More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction , failed to generate the critical acclaim that Prozac Nation did.
In her later career, Wurtzel continued to write, with her later publications garnering the same criticism that her earlier work had: Namely, that it was self-indulgent and overly wordy. She also went to law school, eventually passed the bar, and got a job at a law firm. She even wrote an essay, published on the Brennan Law Center blog , advocating for abolishing the bar exam.
In 2015, Wurtzel announced that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and had undergone a double mastectomy. Unfortunately, according to Wurtz’s husband Jim Freed, the cancer had metastasized and had traveled to her brain.