Elizabeth Wurtzel

Wurtzel died in Manhattan from leptomeningeal disease as a complication of metastasized breast cancer on January 7, 2020, at age 52.

Wurtzel grew up in a Jewish family on the Upper West Side of New York City, and attended the Ramaz School. Her parents, Lynne Winters and Donald Wurtzel, divorced when she was young, and Wurtzel was primarily raised by her mother, who worked in publishing and as a media consultant. In a 2018 article in The Cut, Wurtzel wrote that she discovered in 2016 that her biological father was photographer Bob Adelman, who had worked with her mother in the 1960s.

In January 2015, Wurtzel published a short book entitled Creatocracy under Thought Catalog's publishing imprint, TC Books. It is based on the thesis she wrote about intellectual property law upon graduation from Yale Law school.

In February 2015, Wurtzel announced she had breast cancer, "which like many things that happen to women is mostly a pain in the ass. But compared with being 26 and crazy and waiting for some guy to call, it's not so bad. If I can handle 39 breakups in 21 days, I can get through cancer." She said of her double mastectomy and reconstruction, "It is quite amazing. They do both at the same time. You go in with breast cancer and come out with stripper boobs."

In early 2013, Wurtzel published a New York magazine article lamenting the unconventional choices she had made in life, including heroin use and spending much of a lucrative publisher advance on a costly Birkin bag, and her failure to marry, form a family, buy a house, save money or invest for retirement. "At long last, I had found myself vulnerable to the worst of New York City, because at 44 my life was not so different from the way it was at 24," she wrote. The article was widely criticized. In Slate, Amanda Marcotte called the piece Wurtzel's "latest word dump" and remarked that it was "as lengthy as it is incoherent." Writing in The New Republic, Noreen Malone said of the piece that "Wurtzel wants us to know that she's a mess, and kindly invites us to rubberneck." Prachi Gupta for Salon characterized the essay as "rambling" and "self-involved." In The New Yorker, Meghan Daum called the piece "self-aggrandizing, disjointed, and, in its most egregious moments, leaves the impression that her editors might have been egging her on—or worse, taking advantage of what sometimes looks like a fairly precarious psychological state—in order to ensure maximum blogospheric outrage." By contrast, in The New Yorker Jia Tolentino called the piece "one of the best things she ever wrote."

Wurtzel met photo editor and aspiring novelist James Freed Jr. in October 2013 at an addiction-themed reading. They became engaged in September 2014 and married in May 2015. The couple later separated, but remained close.

Wurtzel's publisher, Penguin, sued her in September 2012 in an effort to reclaim a $100,000 advance for a 2003 book contract for "a book for teenagers to help them cope with depression" that Wurtzel failed to complete. Of the $100,000, Penguin advanced Wurtzel $33,000 and sought interest of $7,500, claiming to have suffered detriment at Wurtzel's expense. The case was dismissed with prejudice in 2013.

The legal community criticized Wurtzel for holding herself out as a lawyer in interviews, because she was not licensed to practice law in any jurisdiction at the time. Wurtzel passed the February 2010 New York State bar exam, and was employed full-time at Boies, Schiller & Flexner in New York City from 2008 to 2012. She continued to work for the firm as a case manager and on special projects. In July 2010, she wrote a proposal in the Brennan Center for Justice blog for abolishing bar exams.

In January 2009, she wrote an article for The Guardian, arguing that the vehemence of opposition demonstrated in Europe to Israel's actions in the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict, when compared to the international reaction to human rights abuses in the Peoples Republic of China, Darfur, and Arab countries, suggested an antisemitic undercurrent fueling the outrage.

In 2009, Wurtzel published an article in Elle magazine about societal pressures related to aging. Regretting her youth of casual sex and drug-taking, and realizing that she was not as beautiful as she once had been, she reflected that "whoever said youth is wasted on the young actually got it wrong; it's more that maturity is wasted on the old."

On September 21, 2008 after the suicide of writer David Foster Wallace, Wurtzel wrote an article for New York magazine about the time she had spent with him. She acknowledged that "I never knew David well."

In 2004, she applied to Yale Law School. She later wrote that she never intended pursuing a career as a lawyer, but rather had simply wanted to attend law school. She was accepted at Yale even though "Her combined LSAT score of 160 was, as she put it, 'adequately bad' ... 'Suffice it to say I was admitted for other reasons,' Ms. Wurtzel said. 'My books, my accomplishments.'" She was a summer associate at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. She received her J.D. in 2008, but failed the New York state bar exam on her first attempt.

While an intern at the Dallas Morning News, Wurtzel was fired, reportedly for plagiarism, although a 2002 New York Times interview suggested that she had fabricated quotations in an article that was never published.

Wurtzel was best known for her best-selling memoir Prozac Nation (1994), published when she was 27. The book chronicles her battle with depression as a college undergraduate and her eventual treatment with the medication Prozac. Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times, “Wrenching and comical, self-indulgent and self-aware, Prozac Nation possesses the raw candor of Joan Didion's essays, the irritating emotional exhibitionism of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, and the wry, dark humor of a Bob Dylan song.” The paperback was a New York Times bestseller. The film adaptation, which starred Christina Ricci, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2001.

More, Now, Again (2001) dealt with her Ritalin addiction and tweezing habits, among other subjects. It received generally negative reviews. For Salon, Peter Kurth wrote that Wurtzel "imagines that every word she utters and every thought that pops into her head is fraught with meaning and portent. And still her new book goes nowhere." He called the book "dysfunctional," characterized the author as an "overage adolescent," and concluded, "Sorry, Elizabeth. Wake up dead next time and you might have a book on your hands." In The Guardian, Toby Young wrote that "Wurtzel's overweening self-regard oozes from every sentence" and concluded, "In a sense, More, Now, Again is the reductio ad absurdum of this whole self-obsessed genre: it's a confessional memoir by someone who has nothing to confess. Wurtzel has nothing to declare apart from her self-adoration. A better title for it would be Me, Myself, I." “[W]hat a messy load it is,” wrote Pace University professor Judith Schlesinger in The Baltimore Sun. Schlesinger wrote that Wurtzel focused on “her contempt for other people—including her readers, who are expected to wade through her sloppy story, buy her shallow rationalizations, and tolerate her incessant tone of self-congratulation and entitlement."

Wurtzel's follow-up memoir to Prozac Nation was titled Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1998). The book earned a mixed review from Karen Lehrman in The New York Times; Lehrman wrote that while Bitch "is full of enormous contradictions, bizarre digressions and illogical outbursts, it is also one of the more honest, insightful and witty books on the subject of women to have come along in a while."

While an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1980s, Wurtzel wrote for The Harvard Crimson and received the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award for a piece about Lou Reed. She also interned at The Dallas Morning News, but was fired after being accused of plagiarism. She received a B.A. degree in comparative literature from Harvard in 1989.

Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel (July 31, 1967 – January 7, 2020) was an American writer and journalist, known for the confessional memoir Prozac Nation, which she published at the age of 27. Her work often focused on chronicling her personal struggles with depression, addiction, career, and relationships. Wurtzel's work drove a boom in confessional writing and the personal memoir genre during the 1990s, and she was viewed as a voice of Generation X. In later life, Wurtzel worked briefly as an attorney before her death from breast cancer.