This archive report was first published on 7 January 2020.
Elizabeth Wurtzel's life was a complex tapestry of angst, addiction, and literary success. Born on July 31, 1967, in Manhattan, she would go on to write one of the most iconic memoirs of her generation, 'Prozac Nation.'
Wurtzel's writing career was marked by her unflinching portrayal of her own struggles with depression and addiction. Her 2002 memoir, 'More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction,' detailed her abuse of cocaine and Ritalin, which she would grind up and snort. As she wrote in a 2013 essay for New York Magazine, 'I made a career out of my emotions.'
However, Wurtzel's life was not without its secrets. In a 2018 essay in New York Magazine, she revealed that she had been raised by the wrong father, Donald Wurtzel, and that her real father was the photographer Bob Adelman, who died in 2016. This revelation led her to reevaluate her difficult relationship with Mr. Wurtzel, whom she had written about extensively in her work.
“Thousands of words on the wrong problem,” she wrote. “I have perfected a two-handed backhand to clobber the lob that is coming at me that is: the wrong problem. I have aced the wrong problem.”
Wurtzel's writing career began at Harvard, where she started working on 'Prozac Nation' in 1986. The book, which was originally intended to be about her experiences at Harvard, eventually became a memoir about her struggles with depression. As she told Vice in 1994, “But everything in it was about being depressed, so that changed it.”
