"Tweaking out in Florida, she becomes fixated on abolishing the death penalty; she tweezes out all her leg hairs individually; she spends days online tracking the status of Mir, the Russian space station."

"In the clarity of recovery, she announces, 'I think I am ten times prettier than I actually am.' She wonders if maybe all the mess she’s made will be worth it—maybe she’ll have produced a work of genius. 'Trouble is, you never know,' she writes. 'You never know until it’s all done.'.... I was always terrified of the way she spoke about death, as if it were a joke she’d been telling to the devil for years.... 'I have always made choices without considering the consequences, because I know all I get is now,' she wrote, at the close of her essay for New York, seven years ago. 'Maybe I get later, too, but I will deal with that later. I choose pleasure over what is practical. I may be the only person who ever went to law school on a lark. And I wonder what I was thinking about with all those other larks, my beautiful larks, larks flying away.'"

From "The Chaotic, Beautiful Larks of Elizabeth Wurtzel" by Jia Tolentino (in The New Yorker).