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Elizabeth Wurtzel — the author of the best-selling memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America — died in a New York City hospital on Tuesday, January 7, according to the New York Times. She was 52 years old.
Wurtzel first rose to prominence at the age of 26 as the author of the memoir Prozac Nation, which documented her struggles with depression and substance abuse. The memoir garnered wide acclaim for Wurtzel’s explosive, deeply confessional style and wry, self-deprecating voice. She is widely credited with ushering in the explosion of the first-person essay and memoir genre that marked the early years of the Internet.
Wurtzel’s husband Jim Freed cited the cause of death as complications from leptomeningeal disease, a condition that results from cancer spreading to the cerebrospinal fluid. Wurtzel was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015.
Born on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Wurtzel was the product of Jewish parents who divorced when she was young, which she documented at length in Prozac Nation. A gifted student, she won admission to Harvard University, where she struggled with depression and substance abuse, and was hospitalized numerous times as an undergraduate.
In 1986, Wurtzel won the Rolling Stone college journalism award, which kickstarted her journalism career. She later contributed pop music criticism columns to the New Yorker and New York Magazines.
After she published Prozac Nation in 1994, Wurtzel was widely hailed as a publishing wunderkind. Her book included explicit details about her sex life, history of self-mutilation and drug use.
While Wurtzel’s subsequent efforts — the essay collection Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1998) and the memoir More, Now, Again (2002) were met with less acclaim — she continued to publish essays and criticism, sparking controversy again in 2013 with a frank, rambling essay about her “one-night stand of a life,” which was published in New York Magazine.
Wurtzel was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015. True to form, she documented her experience in a deeply personal, sardonic, self-deprecating essay for the Guardian. “I hate it when people say that they are sorry about my cancer,” she wrote. “Really? Have they met me? I am not someone that you feel sorry for.”
This story is developing.
Featured via: Rollingstone
