At the start of Prozac
Nation, Elizabeth Wurtzel’s first book, she describes a scene near the
end of her battle with depression, when she was 25. She is in her own apartment in New York City, where a party is
going on, but she is curled up on the floor of the bathroom, feeling
overwhelmed with anxiety and despair. A
friend offers her some cocaine, and she soon feels better, and then, of course,
worse. Two years later Wurtzel’s book
was published, and readers assumed that she had won her battle and was now
depression-free. But that opening scene
of Prozac Nation could be read as a foreboding of what was to follow,
since not long after its publication, she was regularly snorting Ritalin and
cocaine.

Wurtzel’s first memoir was
something of a classic, released just at the right time, soon after Peter
Kramer’s Listening
to Prozac. It was a bestseller,
and the film of the book will be released next month. Wurtzel’s record of her depression was nevertheless a puzzling
book to read, because even while she describes the terrible anguish that
wracked her whole existence, she also spells out her success as an
undergraduate at Harvard and her spectacular career progress. It was hard to escape the conclusion that
Wurtzel was not only extremely talented, but also highly ambitious. Now, she has written two memoirs before the
age of 35, it’s now reasonable to also come away with the suspicion that she
has a narcissistic side to her personality. 

Now, More, Again is a book
to try anyone’s patience. This is
partly because addicts are infuriating; they lie to everyone close to them,
they let people down, they scheme and cheat, and they keep on doing it, and
Wurtzel lays it all out, apparently sparing no details. While coping with the depression of other
people is hard – most people who have tried to convince a depressed person that
there is some reason to not be depressed will easily recall the frustration
they experience as each of their arguments is turned to dust by a person who is
incapable of recognizing anything positive – it is easy to understand
depression as an affliction, and to feel great sympathy for people suffering
from it. But addicts play such an active
role in their self-destruction, and seem so willing to sacrifice the peace of
mind of people they say they love, that they inevitably arouse powerful
feelings of anger and frustration.

This is certainly true of Wurtzel,
who lets people down time and again as she enters ever more deeply into her
addiction to Ritalin and cocaine, with the occasional bouts of heroin use
thrown in. Amazingly enough, during
this time she manages to write a whole book, the aptly titled Bitch,
which, at least according to her publishers, was a best-seller. Even though she does not make herself a
likable character, she nevertheless writes well, and it’s pretty easy to keep
on reading from page to page even when one is wondering how many pages it will
be before she gets into recovery. While
I remember Prozac Nation being a funnier, sharper book, Now, More,
Again is still thoughtful and clever, full of references to movies, books,
TV shows, and rock music, and it is hard not to be impressed by Wurtzel’s
intelligence.

Yet, curiously, she never discusses
why she wrote this book. Maybe it’s
just for the money, although she probably doesn’t need the money now that the
movie Prozac Nation has been made. 
It’s tempting to simply attribute her self-obsession to narcissism and
leave it at that, but it’s hard to explain her readiness to lay all her lies
and deception for all to see if she was merely intending to impress the world
with her talents. Furthermore, she does
make clear that she often hates herself, and even though she is now (we hope)
in recovery, it seems probable that her self-hatred was at the heart of her
depression and her addiction, so it’s very unlikely to have just vanished.

It may be that Wurtzel wrote this
book at least partly as a way of working through her 12-step plan. By the end of the book, she is deeply
immersed in the Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous, going to at least
one meeting every day. Furthermore, she
does not distance herself from the process with intellectual irony; rather she
buys into it wholesale, and increasingly discusses her relation not only to her
own tradition of Judaism, but even her relation to Jesus. She ends by saying she has at last regained
a sense of joy.

Of course, given her history,
readers have some reason to wonder whether Wurtzel’s recovery is final and
irrevocable. Often peace of mind is a
fragile accomplishment, and it’s well known that personal difficulties and even
political events can cause people who have struggled with depression or
addiction to slip into their old, dysfunctional coping mechanisms and misery. The central question for readers coming to
the end of this memoir is, I suspect, whether they care how Wurtzel is doing.

The relationship between author and
reader is one that has been discussed a great deal by literary theorists, but
the specific bond between the reader and author of a memoir is one that may
deserve more scrutiny. Presumably
people are driven by a variety of motives to tell their stories of difficulties
and triumphs, and many memoirs of mental illness often seem like detective
novels, with the writer telling of her search to find the real reason why she
is so unhappy, and also to find an effective treatment for her illness. There’s an air of mystery and adventure in
the journey that the author describes for the reader. But addiction memoirs generally don’t have this romance; the
structure of the story is all too predictable. 
(One might compare More, Now, Again with two other memoirs of
addiction, Drinking:
A Love Story and how to stop
time, to confirm this observation.) 
Rather, with addiction memoirs, the question that remains open at the
start of the book is not to do with etiology or cure, but whether the reader
will lose all sympathy for the addict before the end of the story. This question is addressed to some extent by
the philosopher Norman Care in his book Living With
One’s Past, which focuses on the issue of when people who have
seriously hurt others have done enough to make amends, and can legitimately
move on with their lives.

Of course, Wurtzel does not address
the question herself. But when readers
ask themselves why they are reading her memoir, they will surely agree that it
is not for information about addiction, or just for entertainment, or even for
their literary edification. Some
reviews of this new book by Wurtzel have been quite critical, and it is easy to
see why. (See for example, Salon.com,
the
readers’ reviews at Amazon.com, or The
New York Times.) She does, after
all, go on and on, at length, about herself and her folly. Prozac Nation had much more food for
thought as a discussion of the role of depression in modern society and the
rise in the use of antidepressants, and Wurtzel has precious little to say in
the way of witty reflections of the culture of today in her new book that she
didn’t already say in her first memoir. 
So, in reflecting on why they are reading about the intimate details of
her life, readers have to reflect on their roles as judges. Wurtzel has written a confession, and her
readers are in the position of coming to a verdict on her life – whether to forgive
her. In coming to a decision, readers
are also implicitly making more general judgments about the moral psychology of
addiction.

Even though Wurtzel’s never
explains why she wrote this book, More, Now, Again crystallizes the
issues of morality and forgiveness, and so Wurtzel seems to want to address
ethical quandaries. That’s why I liked
the book as much as I did.

© 2002 Christian Perring. First Serial Rights.

Categories: Addiction, Memoirs