Prozac Nation 25th Anniversary

 

Today on Twitter I saw a tweet about this article on Bustle, celebrating the 25th anniversary of Elizabeth Wurtzel's best-selling memoir, Prozac Nation. because I loved this book and its movie adaptation, I knew I had to mention this on my blog. Those who have regularly read my blog will know reading this iconic memoir made me want to write my own memoir. I was later hesitant to do so because I felt it was too close to what already existed. But other convinced me I had my now story to tell and that it was different. The article says how few mental illness memoirs had already existed when Prozac Nation was published in 1994 and how today Amazon lists over 300 mental health memoirs released in 2019. A once-rare genre of books has since become a thriving one. I now want to get mine out there somehow, but am still uncertain if I want to self-publish my memoir or try sending it out. 

From the Bustle article:

Sarah Wilson, the author of 2018 New York Times bestseller First, We Make the Beast Beautiful (which, she says, is a conversation, not a memoir, about anxiety) was on her own mental health journey in the 1990s when she first read Prozac Nation.

 “I was in the U.S. studying at UC Santa Cruz where I was diagnosed with manic depression, as it was called back then,” she tells Bustle. “I remember feeling awkward about how indulgent [Prozac Nation] was. It was the toe-gazing, self-conscious ‘90s and it was not a ‘done thing’ to be so self-absorbed and aware of your plight. At least not in such an earnest way. Things were more acerbic. But I felt it described what was actually going on. It almost provided the language for the discussion in coming decades.”

I too, was beginning my mental health journey when I first read the iconic memoir. I too, graduated from UCSC in California, though my mental health journey began long after college. 

May is Mental Health Month, an attempt to end the stigma faced with mental illness. The article in Bustle says that stigma kept memoirs of mental illness off bookshelves prior to the 1990s, and:

In a 2017 Guernica article, Charlotte Lieberman argues that mental health memoirs like Gorilla and the Bird by Zack McDermott reduce stigma with “a staunch resistance to shame, a traditional accompaniment to the disclosure of mental health issues.” Wurtzel was one of the first to do what dozens of writers are doing now — tell her personal mental health stories with a “staunch resistance to shame.”

All the more reason I want to get mine out there.


A side note: The Bustle article points out the following:

Wurtzel closes Prozac Nation with a meditation on the death of Kurt Cobain, another icon of the dysthymia who characterized 1990s pop culture. She wrote that Nirvana "either inaugurated or coincided with some definite and striking cultural moments." Prozac Nation is arguably itself one of those striking cultural moments which ignited conversations about how we struggle with, survive, and sometimes fall to mental illness.

I was never a fan of Nirvana (and coincidentally I recently read this book that mentions the '90s grunge band), but in this part of the book she wrote, "...once someone is a clinical case, once someone is in a hospital bed or in a stretcher, headed for the morgue, his story is absolutely and completely his own. ..." Yes, this is exactly what I came to learn. Stories my be similar, but each one has its own details, consequences and such. I came to see what mine were and have them written down. I'm just waiting for the chance for others to see what they are. Another quote from the Bustle piece says:

Literary agent Noah Ballard with Curtis Brown, Ltd. has worked on memoirs dealing with trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, and grief. "Everyone has a story of pain misunderstood, symptoms misidentified, and often loved ones lost," he tells Bustle. "A good memoir, however, isn’t simply the lived experience of trauma or grief, but rather it is finding in the very specific a universal truth.”

I too, fell I discovered a universal truth, as did Wurtzel and others who have written about this subject, such as William Styron in Darkness Visible and Susannah Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted. 

I may not have been in the Prozac game since the 1990s (I began my journey in 2015), but I can still relate to the subject. As soon as I began on the still-iconic antidepressant, I knew I had to read this book to see how well I could relate. Here is the review I wrote on Goodreads upon reading Prozac Nation in early 2016:

As someone currently on Prozac for depression, I knew I had to read this book to see how, if at all, I could identify with what the author described herself going through. Even though I know that it was written over 20 years ago. Still it was a thought-provoking read. And I did see some incidents in the book that were nearly the same as (if not identical to) what I had gone through before beginning my Prozac last year. Although it took me this long to realize I suffered from depression and needed to seek help. I felt I was brave to have read this. 

I have since read it a second time and may just do so yet again 🙂