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The Queen of Snark (Or, What Ever Happened to Elizabeth Wurtzel?)

In 1994, 26-year-old Elizabeth Wurtzel released her first book, a memoir of her struggles with depression, that eventually became something of a pop culture phenomenon. Prozac Nation has since gone down in history as an important and timely work, chronicling both a vibrant, modern young person’s descent into mental illness and the emerging world of newer, better antidepressants and psychological treatment. But Prozac Nation, easily a contemporary to The Bell Jar and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, was not a softly poetic look at the shadows of tortured clinical melancholy. It read more like a rock star biography, filled with sex, drugs, unfulfilled potential, unresponsive doctors, the music of Bruce Springsteen - and hints of deliciously uncensored snark. Even today, when depression and the drugs used to treat it are mentioned as casually as a grande mocha, no whip, Prozac Nation remains a powerful and vital testament to the pain and hope of an entire generation.

I read Prozac Nation when it was first released, and I was blown away by its nakedness and honesty. Elizabeth Wurtzel was a writer with whom I immediately clicked, and over the years I anticipated with bated breath her next literary offerings. I so identified with this unlikely heroine that I came to regard Wurtzel as the straight, Jewish, female version of myself. By sharing her experience and insight, her books have consistently done the single most important thing books do: make us feel less alone.

Wurtzel’s second book was even more wild and irreverent than her first. Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women is a series of essays examining the lives of women that history has deemed “difficult”. From the Bible’s Delilah to Amy Fisher, Bitch is a ruthless, ferocious, funny, and incredibly smart book. The snarkage that Wurtzel hinted at in Prozac Nation is at full-throttle here, producing a fantastic - and often merciless - result. It is a wickedly unique mixture of informed feminism scholarship, extremist manifesto, and stand-up comedy. Wurtzel even poses for the cover…topless and flipping us off. God, I love her.

She published two books in 2001, The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for Uncommon Women and More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction. I did not read The Secret of Life, but I devoured More, Now, Again. Once again, Wurtzel proved to be the ladysnark version of myself. In More, she chronicles her battle with drug addiction, namely Ritalin. What was initially a prescribed medication became an obsession once she started crushing the pills and snorting them. This led to rehab and recovery - and all the rocky roads therein. Wurtzel admits that she was on drugs during the writing of Bitch, a fact that has become clearer to me in rereading that earlier book (it’s still exceptional, by the way, drugs or no). Like Prozac Nation, More is almost uncomfortable in its raw search for truth and wholeness.

And after More, Now, Again came…nothing. No books, anyway. Elizabeth Wurtzel has not put out a book since 2001. She’s still writing, I know, publishing op-ed pieces and the occasional magazine article. In March, she wrote a scathing indictment of modern-day feminism for the Los Angeles Times, and though I didn’t 100% agree with everything she said, I took a great big snark-breath of relief. My soul sister in snark had not changed.

But the question remains. What happened to Elizabeth Wurtzel, or, more appropriately, to her fabulously snarky books? It’s no secret that Wurtzel has an extreme personality. You either love her or loathe her, you’re either comfortably at one with her ideas or totally alienated from them. And a lot of people, especially critics, tend to loathe her. Even a book as famed as Prozac Nation received a mixed critical response. Some found it important and groundbreaking; others found it whiny and selfish. Bitch fared no better; Library Journal wrote, “Hip turns of phrase frequently replace logic in this often smug and overwritten screed.” But the most crushing response was that of More, Now, Again. Few critics, if any, seemed to like it, or at the least even see what Wurtzel was going for. And you well know that I’m all for snarky book reviews, but salon.com, in its review of More, gave what I think is the most cruel book review I’ve ever read. Referring to Wurtzel as “the Suzanne Somers of literary letters” (a title, incidentally, that I would love to have), the reviewer ended his criticism with these shocking words, “Sorry, Elizabeth. Wake up dead next time and you might have a book on your hands.” That’s beyond snark. That’s just fuckin’ mean.

So if Elizabeth Wurtzel retreated into solitude, I can’t say I blame her. I just hope she’s working on another book because I truly miss her challenging, unapologetic style. Even if her next book is a somber meditation on the life of early Franciscan nuns, I’ll still read it. Ms. Wurtzel will always be my Fair Queen of Snark.

Image Source Random House

August 24, 2008 | Filed Under Authors | 131 Comments

Wisconsin Woman Arrested For Not Returning Library Books

Heidi Dalibor, 20, of Grafton, WI, was arrested and booked earlier this month for not paying library fines on two overdue books. The Grafton Library sent numerous letters and phone calls reminding Dalibor about the books, and when their attempts proved unsuccessful, they issued a court citation, which she also ignored. On August 6, she was arrested at her home, put in a police car, and taken to the Grafton Police Department, where she was booked for violating the “overdue library materials” ordinance. Dalibor’s mother, Patty, posted the $172 bail, and Dalibor paid the $30 in library fines. She also gets to keep the two books, White Oleander by Janet Fitch and Angels & Demons by Dan Brown.

All I have to say is DAMN! Librarians have changed since my day. I grew up in a very small town in the Midwest, and we had an awesome, modern library that ensured my survival during those years. There were no such thing as late fees. Hell, they didn’t even call you when a book was overdue. I once found The Very Hungry Caterpillar under my bed…two years after it was due back. When I returned it, no one said a word. I do recall that there was always, on the librarian’s desk, a little Mason jar with a note Scotch-taped to it: “Feeling guilty? Returning an overdue book? Drop a few cents in and ease your conscience.” The jar was always empty.

Poor Heidi Dalibor. Going to the Big House for a couple of books…and not even great ones at that. Actually, I haven’t read White Oleander, but I did read Angels & Demons (meh). Whether she was making some sort of political, literary statement (i.e. “Books, words, can’t be owned!”), or she just plum forgot, it’s a great story. (I tend to think she just plum forgot.)

So this got me to thinking. What books would I be willing to go to jail for? Hmm. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, surely. Becoming A Man by Paul Monette. Anything by Erica Jong. Both volumes of Mary Oliver’s collected poems. But Angels & Demons? Naw, I woulda insisted the library take that one off my hands.

What about you? What books would you be willing to go to the pokey for?

Oh, and to check out Heidi’s delightfully cheerful mugshot, as well as the police incident report for her apprehension, check out The Smoking Gun.

Story Source Yahoo News, The Smoking Gun | Image Source English-Word Information

August 23, 2008 | Filed Under Newsies | 748 Comments

Book Review: More Than It Hurts You by Darin Strauss

Snarknote Please read my re-review of this book.

Josh Goldin has a comfortable suburban Long Island life. He has a beautiful, devoted wife, Dori, and an adorable newborn son, Zack. He works as an ad salesman for a cable TV network, a job that fits perfectly with his laid-back, “everyman” personality. He earns a decent living, owns a nice home, enjoys new fatherhood, loves his wife, and has a good marriage. So what if he and Dori don’t talk much anymore; that’s to be expected when a new baby arrives on the scene. Right? Right?

Dori Goldin is a former phlebotomist who happily left her career to be a full-time mom. Her life revolves around her son, and she’d have it no other way. Even with baby spit-up on her nightshirt, she’s still a beautiful woman, vibrant, intelligent, and committed to her family. So what if, every once in a while, she has to intentionally inflict serious pain on her son in order to bring the family closer together. Right? Right?

Dr. Darlene Stokes is a brilliant physician, Head of Pediatrics at Josh and Dori’s local hospital. Darlene is African-American, a single mother, and has worked with fierce determination and skill to attain the multitude of achievements she’s amassed in her life. One afternoon, Dori Goldin rushes her son to Darlene’s ER with an inexplicable illness: an illness that posits more than a few serious question marks in Dr. Stokes’s head. When she suspects Dori might have had something to do with Zack’s illness, she’s just making the obvious observations and taking the necessary precautions. Right? Right?

In More Than It Hurts You, Darin Strauss, the author of Cheng & Eng and The Real McCoy, tackles the challenging, fascinating terrain of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome (a disorder in which a parent, usually a mother, purposely injures her own child in order to get attention for herself) and its devastating effects. The story is also charged with a panacea of other potentially explosive elements: racism, antisemitism, class divisions, the healthcare industry, the criminal justice system, the slow, agonizing death of American culture. This is a brave, ambitious novel that succeeds nicely on several levels, but falls flat on many others.

Strauss has a terrific gift with prose. Whether burrowing into the innermost thoughts of his characters, or making an airy pop culture reference, he is equally effective. His words are finely-chosen little sparks of electricity that paint a devastating portrait of a family in crises and a doctor in turmoil. Strauss’s impressive prowess with language is what eventually makes this novel as entertaining and readable as it is.

The story, though complex and mesmerizing, doesn’t quite match its author’s talent. More Than It Hurts You frequently veers off-course onto some truly baffling and distracting tangents, and when it does get back in line (which it commendably does), it’s very difficult not to feel a bit jarred. There are a few elongated sequences that, while filling out the “behind the scenes” lives of the characters, prove pretty pointless. Darlene out on a date, in which she waxes philosophical about the current state of music in an overlong indictment of the music industry and music criticism. Darlene’s father, whom she’s never met, just released from prison and unexpectedly becoming a hero during a botched robbery. Josh and Dori’s smarmy lawyer going about his day. All of these plot points are tremendously discursive, and even a little maddening, since the story at the root of More Than It Hurts You is so damn interesting.

Strauss goes to great lengths in painting the detailed inner lives and histories of Josh and Darlene. One feels, at the end of this book, that these two characters are completely human, knowable, and accessible. We learn the stories of their lives, the emotions and fears and mistakes and triumphs that drive them. Both of these characters, for very different sets of reasons, are enthralling.

Unfortunately, this rich characterization does not extend to the book’s central figure, Dori. While we learn intimately the thoughts, ideas, and biographies of Josh and Darlene, we learn virtually nothing of Dori. Though we do come to understand that, in her own messed-up logic, she’s bleeding her son in order to bring her family closer together, we don’t get any inkling of what has led such a bright, sensible woman to this point. There is almost no discussion of her history, what has shaped her and damaged her to result in such a tragically flawed state of logic. And of the three key players in this story, Dori is really the one we should come to know best: she is the catalyst for everything that happens in these pages.

Luckily, we have Strauss’s solid words to carry us through. More Than It Hurts You is definitely readable and often entertaining, but in the end, it doesn’t offer much insight into the illness it’s so harrowingly attempting to examine. If only the story could hold up under the weight of the author’s prodigious talent.

Despite its frequent meanderings, the book does possess some memorable scenes of great emotion and originality. One that plays over in my mind is the passage with Josh, at his company’s lavish annual sales presentation, interspersed with scenes of Dori at home with Zack, strapping him to a board and bleeding him with a needle. This vignetted interplay of such diverse emotion is hugely upsetting and stunningly original.

If only the entire book were as successful. Grade: C+ Revised Grade: B+

Book Title More Than It Hurts You

Author Darin Strauss

Publisher Dutton

Year Published 2008

ISBN 0525950702

Snarkbytes Here’s a funny, drunken Darin Strauss being interviewed on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

August 23, 2008 | Filed Under General Fiction | 17 Comments

The Snark is a creature created by Lewis Carroll in his poem "The Hunting of the Snark". To give a proper description of Snarks, one must look no further than Carroll himself, who summed them up in one word: Unimaginable.

But this much we do know: some have feathers, some have whiskers. Snarks sleep a lot, yet they are an ambitious lot -- with very little sense of humor. They love bathing-machines and tend to bring them wherever they go; they are also handy for striking a light. Snarks live on a far-off island, a place filled with chasms and crags, and are constantly on the lookout for Snark-hunters. Their mortal enemies are hope, care, thimbles and forks.