1 / 19

Elizabeth Wurtzel Prozac Nation

Elizabeth Wurtzel Prozac Nation. Young and Depressed in America A Memoire. Life. B orn in 1967, New York City in a middle class Jewish family parents divorced when she was 2 years old Age of 14 - father disappeared She attend ed the Faculty of Arts at Harvard

palani
Download Presentation

Elizabeth Wurtzel Prozac Nation

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. ElizabethWurtzelProzacNation Young and DepressedinAmerica A Memoire

  2. Life • Born in 1967, New York City in a middle class Jewish family • parents divorced when she was 2 years old • Age of 14 - fatherdisappeared • She attended the Faculty of Arts at Harvard • The Harvard Crimson , The Dallas Morning News • 1994 – ProzacNation

  3. Otherworks • Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1998) • More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction (2001) • The Secret of Life: Commonsense Advice for Uncommon Women (2004)

  4. „I have this palpable, absolute sense that I’m cracking up, that there’s really no good reason why, and that – even worse –there is nothing I can do about it. And the thing that’s really bugging me, as I lie curled up, is that scene I’m enacting reminds me of something: It reminds me of my whole life”

  5. There is a classic moment in The Sun Also Rises when someone asks Mike Campbell how he went bankrupt, and all he can say in response is, 'Gradually and then suddenly.' When someone asks how I lost my mind, that is all I can say too." 

  6. “How can you be tired of London? Samuel Johnson said that anyone who is bored with London is bored with life”“Noah,” I answer, “I think you are finally catching on.”

  7. Depression is… • „It's got nothing at all to do with life. In the course of life, there is sadness and pain and sorrow, all of which, in their right time and season, are normal—unpleasant, but normal. Depression is in an altogether different zone because it involved a complete absence: absence of affect, absence of feeling, absence of response, absence of interest.” • „I willeventually be socrazyfromthisblackwave, whichseemstobetaking over myheadwithincreasingfrequency, thatoneday I willjustkillmyself, notforanygreat, thoughtfulexsitentialreasons, butbecauseIneedimmediate relief, I needthishorriblebigmuddyto go away right now.”

  8. Why „ProzacNation”? „It’ about the mainstreaming of mentalillnessingeneral and depressioninparticular. It is about the way a state of mind onceconsideredtragic has becomecompletlycommonplace, evenworthy of commedy”

  9. “Off lithium, I was fading fast. Some days, I’d sit with Jason reading the Times in the living room and I’d talk a blue streak, presenting him with all my theories about, say, the deterioration of the American family in the late twentieth century and how all relates to the decline of agrarian society. And Jason would mostly sit there, absorbed in the paper, wondering if I would ever shut up.” • What I dofeel is the scariness of being an adult, being aloneinthisbighugeloftwithsomanyCDs and plasticbagsandmagazinesandpairs of dirtysocks and dirtyplateson the floorthat I can’tevensee the floor. I want out of this mess. No onewillever love me, I willlive and die alone, I will go nowehrefast, I will be nothingatall.

  10. “You could think of the 1980 as the year that a mandate for conservatism and getting the hostages the hell out of Iran got Ronald Reagan elected president, or as the year John Lennon was shot to death while signing an autograph… For me, it was all just so much tragedy. It was the year of broken glass and broken girls, of broken me. It was around that time that my father walked out for good”

  11. 7 Drinking in Dallas12 The Accidental Blowjob

  12. “My editors were mystified by my productivity, thought I was mainlining copy or something. They rewarded me by letting me write odd and unconventional essays about art and feminism and Madonna and Edie Sedgwick, or anything else I could come up with, and then they’d stick them front of the Saturday section. They nominated me for awards from the Texas Newspaper Association and the Dallas Press Club. (…)My editors were pleased with my work and I was extremely prolific and conscientious. So they kind of let it slide when I started to crack”

  13. From the last page:“I will never not be on guard for depression, but the constancy, the obsessive and totalizing effect of that disease, the sense that life is something happening to other people I am watching through an opaque cloud, is gone.”

  14. Why did she write her memoir? • Self-treatment: writing is an escapeforher • Make money ? • Make people to love her? “Whenever I talk to anyone I care about, I am always seeking approval. There is always a pleading lilt in my voice that demands love. Even the people I work with, the ones I am supposed to have a professional relationship with, all business, get pulled into my need. I can't help it. I want to be adored.”

  15. Thankyouforyourattention! "You know you've completely descended into madness when the matter of shampoo has ascended to philosophical heights." 

More Related