Eternal Sunshine

From: Moore, Anna (2007) Eternal sunshine. The Observer Magazine 13 May: 20-21, 23, 25, 27-29.

7: Booked on Prozac

Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation placed the drug firmly on the literary map in 1994. At that point, Wurtzel was 26 and had everything her generation was supposed to want (long legs, long hair, rich friends, glib friends, false friends, smart remarks and a loft apartment in Greenwich Village), but she’d suffered depression for as long as she could remember (she first attempted suicide at summer camp, aged 12).

Her memoir starts with her parents’ unhappy marriage and leads to countless breakdowns, hit-and-miss lithium prescriptions and hopeless love affairs. At the same time, though, Wurtzel gets into Harvard, wins a Rolling Stone college journalism award, works as an arts reporter, drives around England in a BMW and lives an impossibly cool rock’n'roll life of the sort only hallucinogens can provide.

The story ends on a high note with Wurtzel given a diagnosis of ‘atypical depression’ treatable with a new drug called Prozac. In the final pages, she feels safe in her skin, looking forward to each day – ‘the black wave’ has gone.

The New York Times dubbed Wurtzel ‘Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna’, while NME described the book as having ‘the same relevance and resonance as On The Road, Catch-22 and Generation X’. A massive hit, it brought home the latest dead-end whinge of youth culture and showed that being young, cool and gifted in the Nineties could still leave you cold; but worry not, there was now an answer – in green and cream capsule form.

Unfortunately, the story was hard to put down. Seven years later, Wurtzel was still taking Prozac but also addicted to Ritalin, pornography and tweezing her leg hairs. Now she wrote about them in a less gripping, less successful More, Now, Again. By the time the film of Prozac Nation was made, starring Christina Ricci as Wurtzel and Jessica Lange as her mother, America’s love affair with Wurtzel was over and it went straight to DVD. She is now a student at Yale Law School.

More memoirs followed, including Lauren Slater’s Prozac Diary (1998), which starts when she takes the drug and is finally freed from her OCD, which had resulted in suicide attempts, self-mutilation and five hospitalisations. After a decade on Prozac, she had a doctorate from Harvard, and was a writer, teacher and a wife.

A more recent addition was Brooke Shields’s Down Came the Rain, an account of her struggle with postnatal depression, in which she was saved not by Prozac, but Seroxat, another SSRI which followed like a pilot fish in Prozac’s unsleeping wake. (p.25).