Elizabeth Wurtzel

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Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel

Born July 31, 1967 (1967-07-31) (age 41)
New York City
Occupation Novelist
Journalist
Nationality United States
Genres Confessional Memoir
Notable work(s) Prozac Nation

Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel (born July 31, 1967 in New York City) is an American writer and journalist famous for her work in the confessional memoir genre. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School. As of January 2009 she is employed by Boies, Schiller and Flexner in New York City despite not yet passing the bar exam.[1] Wurtzel failed the July 2008 New York bar exam.[2] It is not clear whether she took the exam a second time, but she is not on the passing list for the February 2009 New York bar exam.[3]

Contents

[edit] Early life

Wurtzel was brought up Jewish. Her parents divorced when she was young. As described in her memoir Prozac Nation, Wurtzel's depression began at the ages of 10 to 12. She attended the Ramaz School in the Upper East Side of New York City.[4] While an undergraduate at Harvard College, she wrote for The Harvard Crimson and the Dallas Morning News, from which she was later fired for plagiarism.[5] Wurtzel also received the 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award.[6]

[edit] Prozac Nation

Wurtzel is best known for publishing her memoir, the best-selling Prozac Nation, at the age of 26. The book chronicles her battle with depression while being a college undergraduate and how she was eventually rescued by Prozac after a history of therapy and multiple suicide attempts. The film adaptation of Prozac Nation, starring Christina Ricci, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 8, 2001,[7] but never had a U.S. theatrical release. It was telecast on the Starz! network in March 2005[8] and was released on DVD in the summer of 2005.

[edit] Other Work

Following her graduation from Harvard, Wurtzel moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and found work as pop music critic for The New Yorker and New York Magazine. She graduated from Yale Law School at the end of the 2008 term, but has since twice failed the New York bar exam. She writes on a regular basis on pop culture for The Wall Street Journal and is currently employed at Boies, Schiller & Flexner L.L.P..

[edit] Controversy

Controversy erupted over comments that Wurtzel, who lived near the World Trade Center in New York, made about the September 11 attacks. Initially, in an interview in October 2001, Wurtzel had stated:

“ I remember sitting in my apartment and when the first tower fell and the ground shook and one of my windows blew out and there was all this horrible gray and brown dust blowing into my apartment, and I was on the phone with my college roommate, who was calling from Washington basically to say, "Get out of your apartment. You just have to get out of your apartment." And I screamed really loud while I was on the phone with her and I just kept saying, "I'm going to die." And I later spoke to her and she said she's never heard me sound so afraid. And I think it was because for the first time in my life I felt like, you know, in actual danger... As of right now, all it is one horrible, horrible day in the history of this city and this country. We don't know yet what else is gonna happen. But I do think people our age are pretty philosophical about this stuff. Maybe it's just a refusal to believe that anything terrible is going to happen. I mean, maybe that's my problem. Maybe that's what I sound like.[9] ”

However, on February 16, 2002, during an interview with Jan Wong entitled "That's enough about me, now, what do you think of me?", for The Globe and Mail in Toronto, she was quoted as saying:

“ My main thought was: What a pain in the ass... I had not the slightest emotional reaction. I thought, this is a really strange art project... It was a most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance. It fell like water. It just slid, like a turtleneck going over someone's head... It was just beautiful. You can't tell people this. I'm talking to you because you're Canadian... I just felt like everyone was overreacting. People were going on about it. That part really annoyed me... I cried about all the animals left there in the neighborhood... I think I have some kind of emotional block. I think I should join some support group for people who were there... You know what was really funny? After the fact, like, all these different writers were writing these things about what it was like, and nobody bothered to call me. ”

On September 21, 2008 after the suicide of David Foster Wallace, Wurtzel wrote an article for New York about time spent with him,[10] which caused controversy among certain of Wallace's fans.[11]

In January 2009, she authored a highly controversial article at The Guardian[12] arguing that the vehemence of opposition demonstrated in Europe to Israel's actions in the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict, when compared to the international reaction to human rights abuses in China, Darfur and Arab countries, suggested an antisemitic undercurrent fueling the outrage. In her words,

“ But to communicate with anyone I think of as rightminded (and left-leaning) in any other part of the world [i.e. outside the US] is to experience the purest antisemitism since the Nazi era. In fact, in Europe right now, it is de rigueur to liken the current regime in Israel with the Nazi party, and to view the experience of the Palestinians as a form of ethnic cleansing. Hamas and Hezbollah are thought by the French and British to be social welfare organisations, and Israel is viewed as a terrorist state. ”
“ ...with all the troubles in the world, with the terrible things that the Chinese do in Tibet, and do to their own citizens; with the horrors of genocide committed in Darfur by Sudanese Muslims; with all the bad things that Arab governments in the Middle East visit upon their own people — no need for Israel to have a perfectly horrible time — still, the focus is on what the Jews may or may not be doing wrong in Gaza. And it makes people angry and vehement as nothing else does. The vitriol it inspires is downright weird. ”

An immediate response to her article appeared in The Guardian on the same day, authored by Seth Freedman, who argued that "[i]f people falsely claim that Israeli policy is a manifestation of Jewish values and Jewish thinking, it is precisely because people like Wurtzel give them the opportunity to do so with such conflations as this."[13]


She has also been roundly criticized for her critique of the legal system despite being a newly minted associate who has not passed the bar exam and has failed it at least once. [14]

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122367984585224675.html?mod=rss_opinion_main
  2. ^ http://www.observer.com/2008/o2/for-better-or-for-wurtzel
  3. ^ http://www.nybarexam.org/ExamResults/WZ-209.html
  4. ^ 'From Prozac Nation to Yale Law School? Elizabeth Wurtzel's Unlikely Journey', ABC News
  5. ^ The Liars' Club: An Incomplete History of Untruths and Consequences | The New York Observer
  6. ^ http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4370.Elizabeth_Wurtzel
  7. ^ http://hbcprotocols.com/wurtzel.html
  8. ^ Bitter Pill, Entertainment Weekly
  9. ^ "Analysis: Generation X may view September 11th events as a way to shape their generation"; Bob Edwards, Morning Edition (NPR), October 22, 2001
  10. ^ Wurtzel, Elizabeth (September 21, 2008), "Beyond the Trouble, More Trouble: Depression in the best of us", New York Magazine, "Intelligencer", http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/50515/ 
  11. ^ Tkacik, Moe (September 23, 2008), On Knowing Elizabeth Wurtzel Screwed David Foster Wallace, Gawker, http://gawker.com/5053604/on-knowing-elizabeth-wurtzel-screwed-david-foster-wallace 
  12. ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/16/elizabeth-wurtzel-antisemitism-israel-gaza
  13. ^ Come out of your bunker, Elizabeth, The Guardian, 16 Jan. 2009
  14. ^ http://endofesq.com/?p=1138

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Wurtzel"
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