RIP, Elizabeth Wurtzel

I just learned this morning that Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of the bestselling memoir Prozac Nation has died. I love that book so much. Those who have read my blog will know reading PN made me want to write my own story of depression and going on Prozac. I now want more than ever to publish my memoir. It's sad that she will never know how she inspired me😥

My review on Goodreads:

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.

It's been four years since I first read this iconic book. I read it again in June 2018. 

From the New York Times today:

Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose startling 1994 memoir, “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America,” won  praise for opening a dialogue about clinical depression, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 52.

 The writer David Samuels, a friend since childhood, said the cause was metastatic breast cancer, a disease that resulted from the BRCA genetic mutation. In 2015 Ms. Wurtzel had a double mastectomy. 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.

A full obituary will appear soon.

Something she learned in 2018 (click to read the rest):

Life is just a shock to the system.

It turns out that the man I have spent 50 years believing to be my father is not my father.

My mother lied to me about who my father is. My father is Bob Adelman, the photographer, who most famously caught Martin Luther King Jr. in profile having a dream on the Lincoln Memorial. You know the shot. You know many of Bob’s pictures. When they say something is iconic, they just mean everyone knows it. Bob was early for history.

I too chanced young upon the world. When my first book came out, I was 27 years old. Prozac Nation changed the way people see mental illness, and it changed the way publishers see memoirs. The New York Times Book Reviewcalled me “Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna.” I was a hashtag before there was Twitter.

My mother had an affair with Bob Adelman when she was working at Random House. I was born in 1967.

I knew Bob all of my life. When I was 4, Bob gave me a print of his photo of protesters being hosed down in Kelly Ingram Park in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. He gave the same shot to Martin Luther King, who was shocked “that beauty could come out of so much pain.”....