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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

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WHAT IS A SNARK?






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.

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