Prozac Nation

Prozac Nation is a memoir by American writer Elizabeth Wurtzel published in 1994. The book describes the author's experiences with atypical depression, her own character failings and how she managed to live through particularly difficult periods while completing college and working as a writer. Prozac is a trade name for the antidepressant fluoxetine. Wurtzel originally titled the book I Hate Myself and I Want To Die but her editor convinced her otherwise. It ultimately carried the subtitle Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir. The book was adapted into a feature film, Prozac Nation (2001), starring Christina Ricci. Reception Reviews were mixed. In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani characterized Prozac Nation as "by turns wrenching and comical, self-indulgent and self-aware," comparing it with the "raw candor of Joan Didion's essays, the irritating emotional exhibitionism of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and the wry, dark humor of a Bob Dylan song." While praising Wurtzel's prose style as "sparkling" and "luminescent," Kakutani thought the memoir "would have benefited enormously from some strict editing" and said that its "self-pitying passages make the reader want to shake the author, and remind her that there are far worse fates than growing up during the '70s in New York and going to Harvard." Publishers Weekly was similarly ambivalent: "By turns emotionally powerful and tiresomely solipsistic, [Wurtzel's] book straddles the line between an absorbing self-portrait and a coy bid for public attention."