Yet history would prove such criticisms to have missed the point. Sentences such as “My gifts are for life itself, for an unfortunately astute understanding of all the cruelty and pain in the world”, led one New York Times reviewer to wish for some Prozac in order to ease the pain of reading them. No one had read a book like it before, and some wished never to again. Wurtzel, who has died from cancer aged 52, was one of the first people in America to be given the drug Prozac, and her memoir, written when she was 26, splurged with unashamed abandon the wayward details of a childhood blighted by depression, an adolescence blighted by drugs and a period at Harvard blighted by extreme combinations of both. When Elizabeth Wurtzel published her wildly influential first book, Prozac Nation, in 1994, the critics hardly fell over themselves to praise it.
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