Anyone who ventures to write a memoir must posses some degree of narcissism. If not, why would they consider their particular life journey worthy of public consumption? Some writers choose to portray themselves in the very best light possible, while others include all the gory details, winning their audience over through personal expression and sometimes pure shock value. Although writers frequently pull from their own personal history for material and inspiration, Elizabeth Wurtzel has enjoyed a literary career based solely on talking about herself: her depression, her genius, her beauty, and now, her drug addiction.
More, Now, Again chronicles Wurtzel’s self destructive path from casual prescription drug overuse, to full blown cocaine addiction while writing her second book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women. Following the success of her first memoir Prozac Nation, Wurtzel finds herself well behind on her editor’s deadlines for finished pages. Her doctor prescribes Ritalin to help boost her motivation and curb her concentration problems. Having struggled with substance abuse in the past, Wurtzel quickly finds creative and excessive ways to up her Ritalin dose and catch a much needed buzz. She starts crushing and snorting the pills, going from two pills per day to three pills every half hour in record time. After using up every excuse and connection to secure more pills, her habits follow a predictable pattern to harder and harder drugs, until she is having eight balls of cocaine Fed-Exed to her apartment several times a week.
Although her addiction story is hardly unique, her literary talent is undeniable. Unfortunately, she often uses her writing powers for evil rather than good, spending paragraph after paragraph shucking responsibility for her own actions, criticizing her friends, family, and colleagues, and generally over sharing every intimate detail of her thoughts and feelings with the reader. As a Harvard educated, beautiful, healthy, obviously smart young woman, the incessant whining is hard for many people to swallow. I am not one of them.
Most of Wurtzel’s detractors (and there are plenty) focus on her lofty education, and her classic good looks as reasons for her to have little to complain about. For those of us who share the human experience of feeling inherently wrong inside, while others make a fuss over how great we look outside, I identify with her anger, resentment, and cynical attitude towards mankind. Just feeling depressed is frustrating, especially when the general consensus is that you’re too smart and too pretty to be sad. Throw in a serious drug problem however, and people start to cut you a little more slack. Personally, you now have somewhere to direct your anger and frustration (these drugs are ruining my life), and publicly people have an easier time reconciling the disparity between how you look, and how you act or feel (don’t blame her, she has a DRUG PROBLEM).
Drugs classically represent a sexier, more dangerous kind of crazy. Prominent, talented, widely loved figures such as rock stars, actors, and politicians struggle with addiction issues publicly. Many different kinds of genius are associated with turning to drugs to cope with reality, and modern media such as music and film help us associate larger than life, attractive, rich people with the drug user lifestyle. Drugs also fit in nicely with everyone’s perception of how a pretty girl should experience the world, because everyone knows that women who are beautiful are also damaged. They are treated differently from an early age because of their appearance, conditioned to value their looks more than other aspects of their identity, and basically psychologically raped by society from an early age. The crazy/beautiful dichotomy is alive and well in More, Now, Again, but Wurtzel's own clarity on this phenomenon offers a refreshing, often biting perspective that eviscerates her literary critics and cements her place as an intellectual force to be reckoned with.
In More, Now, Again Wurtzel succeeds in addressing, and illuminating the very issues she struggled so profoundly with during the creation of Bitch. Her experience as a difficult woman impacts her decisions and the direction of her life through several stints in rehab, many failed relationships, and eventually sobriety. However wavering her commitment to positive self-construction is, her story prevails with an eloquent, simultaneously self absorbed, yet entirely self-aware voice that makes even her most narcissistic comments tolerable.
Quick comment (I'm in class now, giving a test--more comment later):
ReplyDelete"(because everyone knows that women who are beautiful are also damaged, because they are psychologically raped by society from an early age, and anyways it wouldn’t be fair if they weren’t)."
Are you saying that what everyone "knows" is a stereotype unfairly foisted on beautiful women and that beautiful women are not psychologically raped? Or that beautiful women are, in fact, damaged by people's reactions to them? Or that people create unpleasant boxes to contain beautiful women to punish them for being beautiful?
I can't get a handle on this sentence--on what's irony, what isn't--, and it's obviously an important one since it's the culmination of or summary of your linkage with Wurzel.
The only beautiful woman I ever knew well was deeply damaged--but that may have been nature as much as society. Impossible to tell with a woman of 25.
ReplyDeleteShe never trusted that people were reacting to her work and personality, not her person. Both men and women always acted strangely in her presence--men would literally act like schoolboys to get her attention, again literally doing handstands, offering to buy or build her things, flocking and clustering around her. Bu they could very quickly get angry, frightened, resentful, or threatened if she failed to respond as they would have liked, in other words if she failed to immediately present herself as a sexual object.
Women...either wanted to be close to her and bask in her reflected light (but those relationships were always necessarily unstable) or were disturbed by the way men reacted to her.
She had been raped repeatedly by her much older brother when she reached puberty, had a stressed relationship with both her parents, a long and unhappy series of broken relationships with many men, three abortions, food issues, and so on.
When she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 37, a good deal of her considerable intelligence was convinced that the universe was conspiring to punish her for her many faults and sins.
The single most obvious thing about her--that she was strikingly beautiful--was something she denied with anger, so denying this elephant in the room, how likely was it that she was ever going to be able to come to grips with her life and its problems?
This is just a tangent your review stimulated. I'll have more later.
You've done good work here. Is this like a grown-up equivalent of 'White Oleander'? A book, a set-up you can't avoid thinking about?
ReplyDeleteThe one ambiguous sentence I deal with in comment 1 aside, this review is a ferocious assault on a reader, mirroring what I assume is the model Wurtzel offers.
Let's talk adjectives again. I don't have some inflexible system that I think a writer must hold to. In an earlier piece, I criticized the way you used adjectives. Today I will praise it.
However wavering her commitment to positive self-construction is, her story prevails with an eloquent, simultaneously self absorbed, yet entirely self-aware voice that makes even her most narcissistic comments tolerable.
I count seven adjectives in that sentence, each one of them working hard, none dispensable--nice!
Or: As a Harvard educated, beautiful, healthy, obviously smart young woman, the incessant whining is hard for many people to swallow. I am not one of them.
The first sentence has six adjectives, five in a series--and many writing teachers will tell you that you can only have three adjectives in a series--anything more is tacky or unsophisticated. I'm here to tell you that those two sentences work together beautifully--the first lush and pressured, the second completely slamming the door on lush and ratcheting up the pressure with an unexpectedly bleak and plainspoken six words. A fine contrast made possible by all those adjectives in the first sentence, and the complete starkness of the second.
"Ferocious assault" btw is a compliment in the context of a review. Reviews are meant to stimulate, not lull. This review has gotten a half-hour of writing out of me, so it must have something going for it, eh?
ReplyDeleteI'm glad that you responded to the "psychologically raped by society" sentence. Upon closer inspection, I realized that this sentence exists in my brain as a catchphrase, a sentence that I read somewhere and committed to memory that was especially significant to me, because I identified so closely with it, but had never found as accurate or succinct a way to describe that feeling on my own. It isn't the whole sentence that is borrowed, just the "psychologically raped by society" phrase. This is the 2003 article it is from: http://nymag.com/nymetro/nightlife/sex/columns/nakedcity/n_9603/. The article describes in many ways the same type of woman that you describe knowing. I guess a shrink might hear those characteristics and say "borderline personality disorder" or some kind of mood affliction or anxiety, but I do think it is a nurture just as much as nature phenomenon. People treat people differently based on how they look. And gender roles are strict and fiercely conditioned from an early age. Pretty and smart are most often communicated as being at odds with one another (think Betty and Veronica, Velma and Daphne), so I think girls are often forced to choose an identity that somehow limits them. And then there is the beauty myth itself, many feminists argue that beauty is a patriarchal construct used to oppress women and force them to be sexual objects. I will try to re-work that sentence in my own words so it's more original, and more clear.
ReplyDeleteYou might like Mary Gaitskill's novel 'Veronica' if you don't already know it. Deals in fiction with "beauty and cruelty." (New York Times)
ReplyDeleteIf a catchphrase like 'psychological rape' sticks, as a writing issue it may be a mistake to try rephrasing it or making it original--something that's good...just is good. But the whole sentence is cloudy.