"Elizabeth Wurtzel died nearly three years ago. Since then, silence: No announcement of a repository of her papers, no posthumous publications..."

"... no conferences for the countless writers indebted to her. And so her friends... were shocked to find out only after the fact that the writer’s personal belongings were sold off in an online auction last week.... The bargain-basement prices that resulted made it feel all the more cruel. There was the handbag that they knew Wurtzel would have wanted to go to a specific friend (and even with a reserve of $6,500, the Birkin did not find a purchaser). There went the entire contents of her desk (including three heaping cups of pens and pencils), sold off for $29. The desk itself, beautifully marked with use, had a bit of a bidding war and went for just $535, still way under estimate. A drawing of her rescue dog, Augusta, sold for $20. (I bought her coffee table for $100 — 'Needs Refinishing,' the listing claimed incorrectly — precisely because of the signs of hard use on it.)"

From "The Last Traces of Elizabeth Wurtzel" by Choire Sicha (NY Magazine).

"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).

"Even before 'Prozac Nation' I knew about her because she was a focus of resentment in these kinds of pages, the too-pretty girl who got a job as a music critic..."

"... at New York magazine right out of college before jumping to the New Yorker. It was fashionable to dislike her, to doubt her talent or question the reasons for her success. I’m sure she was difficult; early fame makes people difficult.... If you looked past the hundreds who hated her, there were thousands, maybe millions, who loved her. They were in her Instagram captions, explaining how her books had changed their lives. Even before she died Tuesday, you would stumble across her bright-polished aphorisms about depression and mental health and recovery, shared over and over again on Facebook and Twitter. 'That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.' 'I need love. I need the thing that happens when your brain shuts off and your heart turns on.' 'Depression is so insidious and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.'"

From "Elizabeth Wurtzel was right all along" by Amy Argetsinger (WaPo). To explain the headline: What she was "right" about was the value of the personal memoir.

I love the category personal memoir and have for decades. But I skipped "Prozac Nation" because something about it was off-putting to me. Partly it was the cover:



It gets your attention like mad, but then — for me, anyway — it was more: Give me a break or Who the hell are they saying she's supposed to be?

And then it was the Prozac. Everyone was talking about Prozac. There was "Listening to Prozac" and related articles. I kept reading that Prozac would change all of human life, that we could finally become the human beings we were meant to be. And now Prozac was to be the name of a nation (kind of like "Woodstock nation")? That felt like bullshit to me. Back in the 90s. And it still does today.

But that's about a title and a cover for a book I didn't read. Now, Elizabeth Wurtzel has died, and the feeling of reading the book would be quite different.

And yet, I must say, "Young and Depressed in America" is still very unappealing to me. With what will you furnish the inside of your head?

Elizabeth Wurtzel has died. The author of "Prozac Nation" was 52.

The iconic book was published when she was 27.

From the WaPo obituary:

“Elizabeth’s message was: Never sweep anything under the carpet,” [said Yale writing instructor Anne Fadiman]. “Good, bad, whatever — it’s you. Embrace it. Own it. No excuses. No apologies.”...

[Her] misadventures apparently ended for good in 1998, when Ms. Wurtzel said she stopped using drugs, aside from the antidepressants that she credited with keeping her alive. Within a decade, she also launched a new career, graduating from Yale Law School and joining the white-shoe firm of Boies, Schiller and Flexner in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which she said left her feeling “powerless” and unable to write.

From the NYT obituary:

The writer David Samuels, a friend since childhood, said the cause was metastatic breast cancer, a disease that resulted from the BRCA genetic mutation. Ms. Wurtzel had a double mastectomy in 2015. After her diagnosis, she became an advocate for BRCA testing — something she had not had — and wrote about her cancer experience in The New York Times.

“I could have had a mastectomy with reconstruction and skipped the part where I got cancer,” she wrote. “I feel like the biggest idiot for not doing so.”...

“We resented her for being such a famous and hot little mess,” [wrote Meghan Daum in The New Yorker in 2013], “yet we couldn’t help but begrudgingly admire her ability to parlay her neuroses into financial rewards and a place in the literary scene.”...

For a time she worked for the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, though she left in 2012, saying she wanted to devote more time to writing. “I choose pleasure over what is practical,” she wrote in 2013. “I may be the only person who ever went to law school on a lark.”...

Charles P. Pierce — who "back[s] up to nobody in my respect and love for The Master" — is irked that somebody else is writing about Bob Dylan.

"Songs of his I could not understand in my youth mean more to me now than a lot of Scripture does," but when he reads Elizabeth Wurtzel expressing all manner of reverence for Dylan, Pierce shifts to being one of the many here among us who feel that Dylan is but a joke. "Desolation Row" —  for just this one moment — becomes "one of the great stand-up comedy routines." Because nothing's funnier than a heart-attack machine.

"I may yet get married — statistically 90% of people get married at some point."

"But I would say that love and craziness has overwhelmed my life, and I am trying to write about it, and at the same time tell the story of New York City from 1609 to the present."

So writes Elizabeth Wurtzel, as quoted and diminished by Amanda Hess. Wurtzel writes about herself — and whatever else goes into the old talking-about-me grinder, like, apparently, the history of NYC — and Hess asserts "Wurtzel’s work has veered, Cat Marnell style, into the realm of self-help," then critiques Wurtzel for not giving good self-help. Is that fair? Maybe I haven't read enough Wurzel — here's here Reddit "Ask Me Anything" — but what I hear her saying is: I'm the wild bohemian, this is something I am deep in my soul and you are not and can never be, and therefore I am the writer and you are the ones who must read me, read me, read me.

Speaking of self-help, I wish I could help myself not to Google "Cat Marnell."

The sex and the presidency analogy.

"Running for president is like sex... No one ever did it once and forgot about it," says James Carville, talking to Maureen Dowd, who inserts a few paragraphs — for decency's sake? — before getting to this additional Carville quote:

"[Hillary]’s gone to hell and back trying to be president. She’s paid her dues, to say the least. The old cliché is that Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line. But now Republicans want a lot of people to run and they want to fall in love. And Democrats don’t want to fight; they just want to get behind Hillary and go on from there."

What's with all this love and sex analogizing? I hear in it echoes of Barack Obama's crushing "You're likeable enough, Hillary."



Going back into my own old "likeable enough" posts, I find this 2010 link to Instapundit:

ELIZABETH WURTZEL: “I suppose I should confess: I like Sarah Palin. I like her because she is such a problem for all these political men, Republicans and Democrats alike, with their polls, and their Walter Dean Burnham theories of transformative elections, and their economy this and their values that–and here comes Palin, and logic just doesn’t apply. . . . The Democrats are total morons for not finding their own hot mama before the Republicans did so first, or maybe I should have left off the qualifiers and called it straight: the Democrats are just plain morons, at least where women are concerned.”

... But the very essence of old-line Democratic feminism is to reject feminine appeal. It’s Bella Abzug and Hillary Clinton as role models.

Politics is like sex, and people want to fall in love, but it gets complicated when it's women in politics. Think about sex/don't think about sex. A paradox. A quandary.

"Men try harder, because they know that women want men who earn more."

"Women don’t because they know that men have different priorities, and because they want to quit the rat-race at some point and have kids, making their tolerance for high debt levels rationally lower."

Says Glenn Reynolds, reacting to this Inside the Law School Scam post about how law school — with its high tuition and iffy job market — is a worse deal for women than for men.

This is getting strangely close to the argument that used to be made for discriminating against women in law school admissions (or for excluding them altogether): Since women are less likely to fully use their legal education, we shouldn't give what could be a man's seat to a woman. Women were suspected of going to law school for ulterior reasons, such as to find a good husband or — crazy ladies! — because they are interested in the topic... intellectually.

"There is a gap between me and everyone, like a perforated box of polluted air is separating me from people..."

"The space from me to anyone who might understand how lousy I feel seems vast. I am harsh and defeated, and I never thought I would describe myself in either way. The list of things I can’t be bothered with goes on forever. The list of things that bother me goes on forever. I have lost my life."

A fragment of Elizabeth Wurtzel in New York Magazine. It's time to talk about her again, I thought I should let you know.

"Oops — could Penguin be S.O.L., thanks to the S.O.L.?"

"This is why you shouldn’t sue a Yale-trained litigatrix who used to work at Boies Schiller."

"For the longest time I would not date anyone who would now be called a one-percenter because money and power are such a potent combination..."

"... and if I am going to be bossed around, I don't want that to be the reason. When it's come up, I have chosen not to get married. Over and over again, I have opted for my integrity and independence over what was easy or obvious. And I am happy. I don't want everyone to live like me, but I do expect educated and able-bodied women to be holding their own in the world of work."

Says Elizabeth Wurtzel, who's blaming the "war on women" on the "one percenters" and insisting that "real feminists" earn their own living, and proclaiming that there's " only one kind of equality... and it's economic."

She's irritating for about 10 reasons, including the fact/fiction that rich men are clamoring to marry her.

"[T]he very essence of old-line Democratic feminism is to reject feminine appeal."

Claims Glenn Reynolds, responding to Elizabeth Wurtzel who calls Democrats "total morons for not finding their own hot mama."

Hey! What about Hillary? She's likable hot enough.

All the best people fail the bar exam... Elizabeth Wurtzel says.

And she's among the people she's talking about:

The common denominator among the bar-failers in my class at Yale Law School—and there were a few—was a complete inability to comply with senseless rules; they weren’t the best students, but they were the tartest and the sharpest people—and the least likely to accept the constraints of Big Law that make neither financial nor intellectual sense: the fifty-state survey to prove a negative, the memo to nowhere, the repetitive brief that says nothing and gets read by no one.

Hey! That's one sentence. It's got 3 dashes, a semicolon, 3 commas, and a colon. Let me step back from the big meta- critique and extrapolate one easily followed item of advice: Write short sentences! Human beings grade bar exam essays. I have graded bar exam essays. It's hell. I was trapped in a hotel conference room and not allowed to leave until I'd graded a pile of exams that, as a lawprof, I'd take a couple weeks to grade (with refreshing breaks for snacks and walks and blog posts).

Wurtzel goes on to claim that the practice of law would be better if the sharp, tart folks who resist senseless rules had the advantage in seeking access to the profession.  Imagine the access ritual that would vault them to the front of the line. I would try to do that for you right now if I weren't distracted by thinking that writers of short sentences are the ones to be encouraged. Don't write a long sentence unless you have a good reason. And don't use a semicolon unless you'd be willing to pay $5 for the privilege of using a semicolon. Each time. That's just a test I made up. Now, stop annoying me. And don't make things more difficult than they need to be. That's a rule. It's not a senseless one. It is a rule brimming with sensibility.

"Thank God for La Mer and Retin-A and Pilates — and, yes, hot sex..."

"... which is good fun and may be no more than a Maginot Line against the inevitable, but that’s not nothing. And my hair, honey-highlighted for years now, has the swank length of mermaid youth—which is how I plan to keep it no matter what proper pageboy is age-appropriate. No question, there are physical facts about my age that are undeniably delightful. I am much sexier now than I used to be—I suddenly have this voluptuous body where I used to just be skinny and lithe. Really oddly, a couple of years ago I got serious breasts, to the point where people think I’ve had them surgically enhanced, which I certainly have not. Still, I think, the honest truth is that I’m just not as pretty as I used to be. Something has abandoned me. I don’t know what that thing is—they’ve been trying to jar it and bottle it for centuries—but it’s left, another merciless lover. My hips are thicker, my skin is thinner, my eyes shine less brightly—will I ever again glow as if all the stars are out at night just to greet me? What finally falls away, after enough things don’t go as planned, is that look of expectancy—which, when worn down to pentimento, is revealed to be exhaustion."

Elizabeth Wurtzel is doing that complaining/bragging thing again. This time, the problem is she's getting old, but she's still way prettier than you, she hopes you know. She's 41, by the way, which seems young to me, but perhaps — do I remember it properly? — that's a time when the fear of aging and death spikes.

Via Jezebel, who says:

As she explains with characteristic candor, she was always a beautiful child, a "hot number," a woman who traded on her looks. And she misses it. While she sees the danger and futility of valuing beauty overmuch, she can't help it: panic trumps insight and she doesn't seem eager to stop it. And it's scary to see a smart and accomplished woman so openly in the thrall of others' opinions.

"It's a weird test. I think when you go to a different school than Yale you are better prepared for it."

Elizabeth Wurtzel, awkwardly confronted about failing the New York Bar exam, has the wit to say something quotable and suitably hostile. Actually, the first thing she said was: "Wow, really? I had no idea. I didn't even see that. That's interesting," which means fuck you.

Then she came up with the quote I put in the title, which means your law school sucks.

After that, she said, "It was definitely hard. I guess when I should have been studying, I was kind of having a good time," which means my life is so much more interesting than yours, you tiny little insect.

All of which was totally justified. Then the insectoid interviewer probed her about whether she was getting any literary writing done anymore and how she felt about not looking like the way she looked in that old photograph that was taken of her 2 decades ago. In answer to the latter question, Wurtzel said: "I'm actually thinking of writing about it, though I don't want to write yet another miserable book that lots of people can relate to." Which also means fuck you.

"I used to feel that I spent too much of my time in my pajamas doing nothing..."

"... and I’d think 'in the time that I don't spend writing, I could raise a family of five.' In a lot of ways, being a writer is lonely and alienating. You hear about the work ethic of people like Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike and you think 'well, God bless them, but I don’t know how they do it.' Most of the rest of us just wind up watching Oprah. I was roaming the neighborhood every day, lingering at the dog run with my dog. It was really bad. I just wasn’t doing enough, and I feel like law school sort of gave me my voice back. When you have a lot to do, you get a lot done. At least that’s how it’s been for me."

That's Elizabeth Wurtzel trying to give a believable answer to the question why she went from the life of a writer into the big law firm lawyer's life. So you think, with all my free time I could be raising 5 kids, so.... I'll go to law school and work in a big law firm?

Actually, I understand the logic. When you are purely a writer, you are hanging around the house a lot. You can feel very odd and at loose ends. If the house is empty, you may think, I could be raising kids what with all the time I spend loafing and moping, but that doesn't mean you want to raise kids (who you must know will be demanding during your creative spurts as well as your down time). It just means, it's a weird way to live, on your own at home. Maybe what you need is not other human beings in the house, but to get out of the house, to have a life that has more to do with interacting with adults and affecting the network of adult activities. Law is the perfect entree.

And a writer needs something to write about. You may venture out into that complex world of adult enterprises and eventually bring it all back home, where you can write again. We were just talking about the way Bill Ayers signed up as a merchant seaman, thinking he'd gather the material he to write a great novel. Was Ayers thinking about Herman Melville? Joseph Conrad? Was Wurtzel thinking about Scott Turow?

Flea at USC.

He's a freshman, studying music:

The Chili Peppers [created tension] in our song structures but all based on emotion and intuition as opposed to knowing the math and academics of it. Knowing the structure is really fun.

He's also working on a solo album:

I’ve been making a record at home and it’s nearly done. It’s mostly instrumental stuff but I have Patti Smith singing on it and the choir from the school but mostly it’s an instrumental record. I’m not sure how to describe it but a lot of people have described it as cinematic, like soundtrack music. It’s not really a commercial enterprise, it’s not going to be on rock radio or anything. The record is based on the character Helen Burns from "Jane Eyre." I love Charlotte Bronte and all of the Bronte sisters.

That "Jane Eyre" stuff sound really nerdy, but if you've ever seen the Orson Welles movie version, you know that Helen Burns is the most stunning beautiful child ever seen in a film:



But no, Flea (Michael Balzary) says he's mad about the Brontes, and he's going to college, so I'll assume it's about the books, not how insanely beautiful Elizabeth Taylor is in that movie.

Here's Flea playing the bass:



He's studying trumpet (and music theory and composition) at USC.

AND: No, a men in shorts tag is not called for!

Palpatinian tranche.

I've been reading and listening to people talk for over a half century, so it's really weird to have to look up 2 words in 2 hours.

First, MadisonMan, he of the bird's-eye view of the Michelle Obama rally-ette, said:

I agree that McCain's post-hit grin is a little too Palpatinian.

Okay, now you know I haven't been following the "Star Wars" saga. I'm not ashamed of that. In fact, I'm one of those people who blame "Star Wars" for ruining film.

And then I had to go and read the Gawker item with the revolting title: "Why We Are Better For Knowing Elizabeth Wurtzel Screwed David Foster Wallace."

That Elizabeth Wurtzel had some thing with David Foster Wallace in the nineties is the type of news flash I'd like to have failed detecting this week. Namely because to blog about Elizabeth Wurtzel is to tempt oneself to unwind the various tranches of disquietude summoned when someone like me conducts a Wurtzel Google Image Search. There's the first tranche of familiarity; I've conducted this search before; the second: I remember quickly that I will invariably, though tempted by the grainy topless shots from Bitch, will like Radar before me quickly settle on the hottest color photo available, the one she used for the cover of her 2001 addiction memoir More, Now, Again, even though Wurtzel has graciously offered us photographic evidence that she has, in the intervening (ohgod) seven and a half years, aged. For this is not a new asset, this story; the underlying episode dates back to the nineties, when Wurtzel was still dressing up her faculties and skills with too much blue eyeliner and too many mood-altering substances in lieu of the appropriate degree of risk management and/or clothes.

I admit it. I don't study finance. That's why I unfortunately cannot help you with the burning question of the day, whether the big bailout is the desperately needed cure or a horrible, evil boondoggle. I'm sorry. Really.

So let's examine that tranche for a second: here we have Wurtzel, drawn to David and his big, serious, ambitious, meaty, unfrivolous gold standard of a book; David, drawn to Wurtzel by her fucking leotard and perhaps her nebulous promise to impart upon his serious asset some sort of value-unlocking sense of "buzz"; the confusing, fuzzy subprime relationship they signed onto; all fuzzy fundamentals and wild histrionics and bombastic promises dependent on "trajectories" neither knows how — neither is socialized to know how — to prepare for a soft landing; yeah, you've done that sort of fucking.

Is Gawker trying to write like David Foster Wallace? David's dead, baby.



David's dead, but there were some good movies after "Star Wars."

"Let's talk about the fact that with a 160 on the LSATs, Wurtzel was much better suited for Northeastern than Northwestern, let alone YLS...."

"... which raises serious questions as to their admissions standards." Adam Bonin seems kind of irked at all the attention Elizabeth Wurtzel has gotten and continues to get. I mean, really, the LSAT is not the only factor. Yale gets all the high LSATs. High LSATs should mean nothing to them. Get some interesting people. Why should Yale care if they'll fit in law firms or have problems passing character requirements for the bar? The key is to get something interesting going in the classroom. Yale had every reason to think Wurtzel would spice up the mix.

"While I could never advocate censorship... the three young women... harmed by AutoAdmit... deserve a way out of this electronic shock."

Elizabeth Wurtzel -- the "Prozac Nation" memoirist, now a Yale Law student -- opines rather incoherently about the AutoAdmit dustup.

[T]he Washington Post ran a front-page story about some young women here at Yale Law School whose careers--if not their lives--had been ruined by some salacious postings. The descriptions of them--sluts and whores--and the suggestions about what might be done to them--rape and sodomy--were showing up on Google searches of their names, and had prevented at least one of them from securing employment.

Since then, Dean Elena Kagan at Harvard Law School and Dean Harold Koh here at Yale have sent out open letters, condemning the nasty communications. We've had speak-outs and write-ins, organized blue-ribbon panels and worn red outfits for solidarity. There's talk of legal remedies and media campaigns....

In such a world, what to do about AutoAdmit? To start with, pray for mercy, because based on the content of its postings, the future of jurisprudence does not look good. Having done that, plead for civility. Just because we can say anything, does that mean we must say everything? While I could never advocate censorship, I would certainly ask for sensitivity....

Because people are delicate. The neighborhood rumormongers of yore could cause enough trouble in a small town, but the unpoliced World Wide Web is really a mess. It's unpoliced, which demands that we be better people, gentler and more humane. Because if not we will surely all go mad. As it is we are overwhelmed: It never stops, we don't know how to stop it, we wouldn't want to anyway, and then we relish complaining about it. This is how we live now. Do we want to add random postings about ourselves, our private selves, that aren't even true, into this volatile mix? AutoAdmit for adults?

In the mean time, the three young women here at Yale Law School who've been most harmed by AutoAdmit--beautiful and brilliant all--deserve a way out of this electronic shock.

"In the mean time"? Well, I guess we are living in a mean time. Maybe sometime in the future, people will be nicer.

In the meantime, I'm still recommending laughter and a thick skin. It's much more liberating than asking your professors to nurture your sensitive soul.

Speak-outs and write-ins, organized blue-ribbon panels... oh, my.