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Prozac Nationwas, to 16-year-old me, a book to be read sneakily.
I established myself as someone much too precious.
And shed also never been allowed, by a literary community that saw her astoo mucheverything.
Fawned over too greatly.
Too boisterous, too revealing, too frank.
Why was she allowed to write such crap?
For years, critics continued to treat her work as an affront to the idea of nonfiction.
And underneath every snitty swipe at her was more than a tinge of jealousy.
She wrote aNew Yorkermusic columnbeforeher success.
She published a second memoir eight years after her first, despite unspoken strictures against such vanity.
She didnt take staff jobs and sit lumpily behind desks in open-plan offices.
She didnt populate the citys slush piles.
She had the audacity, asGawker writer Moe Tkacik ranted, to be interminably depressed but not commit suicide.
And thats really it, isnt it?
Wurtzel would live through hell, come through it, and turn that hell into a success.
