PROZAC NATION -- Elizabeth Wurtzel.

" Pass the pills and fancy plants/give us this day our daily trance"

" You associate 'madness' with Zelda Fitzgerald in all her rich, gorgeous, cerebral disturbedness, or maybe you think of it as something that members of Aureliano Buendia's family sank into at the incestuous end of 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. Madness is something of the fiery hot tempers of Latin America of the Deep South, of Borges and Cortazar or William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. Madness is delightful to the beholder, scary in its way, but still fun to watch; a sport for spectators and rubberneckers who can't avert their eyes from the awfulness that they know they shouldn't be seeing.

Madness is Jim Morrison swinging suggestively out the seventh-floor window of his suite in the Chateau-Marmont ; it's Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton duking it through the cramped camera angles of 'Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?' ; it's Edie Sedgwick in all her anemic, anorexic beauty, trying to do herself in with amphetamines & pearls while dancing on the table at Ondine and posing for Vogue as a youthquaker; it's Kurt Cobain in EVERY one of those Nirvana videos -- looking like a man who is sick, deeply sick , who needs help badly and wears his desperation like a badge of cool; it's Robert Mitchum with his tattooed knuckles, preaching and ranting in ' The Night of the Hunter'. It's Pete Townshend smashing his perfectly good guitar into bits and pieces; it's every great moment in rock and roll, and probably every great moment in popular culture.

But *depression* is pure dullness, tedium straight up.

Depression is, especially these days, an overused term to be sure, but never one associated with anything wild, anything about dancing all night with a lampshade on your head then killing yourself....the word 'madness' allows its users to celebrate the pain of its sufferers, to forget that underneath all the acting out and quests for fabulousness and fine poetry...

...there is a person in huge amounts of dull, ugly agony. "
***
I realize that is the longest book quotation in history, but I had to show everyone how beautifully Wurtzel writes. Sure, there are a few esoteric references...but if and when you recognize what she's talking about; well, you know EXACTLY what she's talking about.

'Prozac Nation' is Elizabeth Wurtzel's own memoir of her ongoing battle with depression. However when you read it, it doesn't seem like an autobiography at all. It's more like a fairy tale gone terribly wrong. The book spans about 15 years from when she first started feeling depressed...to after college when she became a writer.
The book was written in 1995 and in the edition I have, she includes an epilogue where she responds to comments and citicisms of her book.

God, I can't even begin to write about this book. There are so many things I could talk about. Sometimes I had to put the book down because it was so emotionally raw. Liz tries everything to get better...always burying herself in school, in books, in therapy, and of course...in drugs ( legal and otherwise. ) She goes to Dallas to intern for the Dallas Morning News and lives in Oak Lawn. " Drinking in Dallas" had to be one of my favorite chapters...reading her recollection of late-80's Deep Ellum was awesome. The way she describes running through the streets and into the clubs high on shrooms and a bottle of champagne is heart wrenching....she was so desperate.

Each chapter begins with a quote. ( If I wrote a book I would do this too! ) Words have so much power and relevance; especially when you can incorporate someone elses words into your own. It makes you feel unified. You know the song/poem/verse, whatever; thus you know the feeling trying to be conveyed. Wurtzel loved to quote authors of course: Styron and Faulkner and Plath...but somewhat comically, she quoted Bruce Springsteen. And I must say, the Springsteen lyrics I read were beautiful and really relevant to the times Liz was growing up. This was the soundtrack to her life; her illness.

Then there is the hot-button issue of the book. Meds versus therapy. Nature versus nurture. Are you depressed because your parents are divorced and you grew up poor, or are you depressed because your stupid neurons aren't firing fast enough? When Liz hits rock bottom, prozac was still an experimental drug. The anti-depressants of the 80's weren't specialized enough. Meladil ( A drug that in 3 years of psych classes I havent even heard of ) seemed to cloud her mind to mush, then altogether stop working. Prozac seemed to work OK for her in the end.

And now....it does for millions of Americans.

Yes, I think anti-depressants, ADHD drugs, and alllllllll the wonderful happy psychoactive/psychotropic medications are necessary, but only for an elite percentage of the population. I was sitting through abnormal child psych class and learned that in some elementary schools upwards of 50% of the kids are on meds for ADHD... ( ritalin, aderol, and some new one that isn't addictive like the former 2 ) . We live in a world of quick fixes and even though this book was poignant and in it Liz was obviously miserable...but in the end it suggests that meds are the end-all cure-all. Which, is really sad considering that on anti-deps you never feel highs or lows. Ritalin and Aderol turn kids into sluggish autonotons...inhibiting motor neurons from growing.

So yeah, think twice before you med you or your loved ones into a stupor :)

Anyway, I'm so glad I read this book. Don't read it if you can't handle hearing others whine. You have to keep reminding yourself that this is/was a real person. Real struggles...real thought.

Yay books. Don't know when I'll have time to read my next one...'Interpretter of Maladies', but I will someday :)